Welcome to Season 2 of the Rousinshine Podcast, a season dedicated to practical insights on how to redesign your career and a live experiment to test our insights in real life. Featuring us, the Swedish sisters, Justin, Rous and Victoria Rous also. Based in the US and the UK, we share experiences from our international lives and careers. Good evening, this is Jessica Bean from Brighton, England.
And good afternoon, this is Victoria from the most gorgeous sparkling fall afternoon in Atlanta. We are finally in the final quarter of 2020 and this season we are talking about careers. Yes, and we have identified four cornerstones of a successful career, being health, purpose and connection and wealth, which we have explored, some of them already, in previous episodes. And the previous one was about purpose.
So, Josephine, because you're sort of our guinea pig again, because you've moved across the ocean to a new country, you're kind of redesigning your own career at the moment, how's the work going on your purpose? It's going well. So, last episode is really interesting. I mean, we were really digging into prototyping, testing and designing a new career.
And I've really followed that. So, I've done a lot of connection with new people. I have tested and started up with new things and really prototyping. So, it's going quite well.
That's awesome. And really, I remember you being super excited also about today's topic, which is all about connection. Absolutely. So, moving to another country in the midst of COVID situation, it means that some of the normal ways that we would connect and the ways that I was quite excited about connecting are not really the most viable options.
Yeah. So, I really felt like this was a useful conversation to have and to share with everyone else who is connecting and connecting virtually. Yeah. And we know, of course, from both from our experience and from the research that to be happy in your career, the connections in your life really, really matters.
And we see that from the perspective, both of obviously the type of life that you are, the type of connection that your career enables in your larger life, but also the type of connections that you get through your work and through your career. Yeah. So, this episode today will really focus on the connections that enables your career, sort of within your career. And as you just said, this special situation that you're in right now, you're not on your own with so many people in situations where they're sort of really forced into redesigning their career.
So, we really want to give you some practical tips and tricks and ideas of what you can do to build your network, grow your connections in this time that we're in right now. And connect in a meaningful way, even though it might be virtual. Yes. And I believe that we maybe started off in the pandemic doing that quite well, and we have now been a little bit fatigued and there are new challenges that are coming up.
So, we really wanted to give some new insights beyond just assuming meeting connection, but some insights that we have in terms of how you can connect virtually. Yeah. So, we believe that connection is really one of the key core cornerstones to achieve a successful career. Yes.
And we really felt that we needed to put connection as one of the key cornerstones in our model, because connection is just so vital, the connection that we have at home, that we have with our family, but also the connection that we have with our colleagues, the people that we work with, the kind of energy that that gives you and the purpose and the meaningfulness. I mean, we're human after all. We need connection. Yeah.
So, yes. So, it's all about connection today. It's all about how do you connect in order to grow and redesign your your career? And I would say that I've shifted quite a bit in the way that I think about connection.
And also, I think that I've shifted a little bit in terms of how I view connection with myself. I've always seen it as really important, of course, to be well-connected and so on. But I feel that as I'm maturing in my career, I'm also more about doing what I truly enjoy and that I truly feel what it's right to me and not what ought to be right to me. Yeah.
Or what society suggests is right to me. And I read about this exercise recently, which is, I mean, the most basic. It's just this hot and cold exercise. But I think it's a really great practice to bring in early or wherever you are in your career right now, whether it's early in your career or later in your career and you haven't developed this already, bring it in.
And that is to make a regular practice to feel, listen in words and just do the simple exercise. Does this feel hot or cold to me? And why? Yeah.
And help enable that to make decisions that are more and more based on your inner knowing or your gut feeling and really make a sense to develop that because it will make you so much happier in your career over time. Yeah. That is awesome. And I actually think that the deeper perspective really adds value, short term and in particular, long term to your career.
I also think that whilst you are in the midst of redesigning your career, we need to realize that the sort of old way of applying to jobs with CVs and job ads, that's a very small number of people actually getting a new job that way. It's mostly gone. So really, the key to success is also to build your network and create connections that can help you enhance your career. So for everyone now that's sitting, you want to have new ideas, new inspiration for how to connect meaningfully and virtually over the next month, we have developed a list for you of our five key tips.
Yes. So number one on our list, drumrolls is show up as the true you. So really, what you actually just started to talk about, start by connecting with yourself and then let it show. Beautiful.
And it's really about being authentic and being vulnerable. And that might be on social media. It might be on LinkedIn. And it might even be to yourself.
And so I'm a fan of Brene Brown and she's in her book, Braving the Wilderness. She's talking about the quest for true belonging and the courage to stand in love. How they're really related. If you truly want to belong, you first need to have the courage to stand alone.
I think that's what's so important. When it comes to creating connections, we first need to have that courage to stand up for ourselves and be at peace with ourselves. Yes. And there are of course, I mean, most of us are, many of us I would say, are profiling ourselves, especially in regards to our career.
We're proffing ourselves on LinkedIn or other social media channels. And you have been quite brave, I would say, on LinkedIn. And you have really adopted the authenticity and vulnerability strategy to some extent. And I think it's an interesting, I'd like you to tell us about it.
And I think it's interesting because I feel that on LinkedIn, normally, we really tend to go for the professional photo and really showing the best of ourselves. And I'm not saying that you're not showing good sides, but tell us a little bit about your LinkedIn strategy, if I can call it that. Yeah. Well, thank you.
And I guess I could tell many more stories about things that work and not working. But I think it's just really important to be authentic. And I also noticed that I'm getting a lot more positive response and reactions whenever I share struggles or learning points and things like little stories, little insights that makes it more personal because trust me, I have lists of lots of things that leaders can do to get better. And I share those too.
But yes, it's when the magic happens, when I make it more personable. So I really seem to change there. Yeah, you make it very relatable and you often share your own story or your own struggle. And then of course, that leads to very practical or leadership skills or so on.
But you should follow Victoria on LinkedIn and learn from that. But I think it's an interesting approach because it's a little bit different from the normal way of LinkedIn. You know what? Now it makes me think of a story when I was delivering a workshop earlier before COVID hit.
And so it was live and I was with a group of senior engineers. I do this also when I facilitate, I share examples of things that didn't really necessarily go that well, rather than to share a pick like, hey, I did this so great. Right? So anyway, the workshop went really well and people were really happy.
But when President put in his evaluation form, like, should this woman really be facilitating leadership courses with all her failures? So that was a smiley place or this person was just going, no, no, no, not so smiley face. Yeah. So I was really like, okay, maybe I should find a better balance.
And but really he was like a little bit disappointed. He thought I had too many failures. But I think it's important to be open about that. So learn from Victoria in both ways.
Yes, exactly. So and really the fact is that having sat on the opposite side of the table and recruited a lot of leaders and people into the teams that I've led, I also want to hear about their mistakes. And more importantly, I want to hear about what they learned from that and see because that is really how we grow by trying things out and learning from an experience. So I want to see are they authentic around that?
Exactly. And I believe in terms of the further you get along in your career and you know how many struggles and how many vulnerable situations there's been. And of course, if you have people that are connecting to that, it's easier to relate to. So for everyone then who is now redesigning their career and really following this podcast, in terms of that journey, for number one on the list, then one of the things that you can do is really just to start the holding cold exercise, connect in words, and then depending of course on what you feel comfortable with sharing with your network and start to share in an authentic way.
Yeah. And I guess most important of all is don't try to be someone that you're not. Be who you are. Be yourself.
Because at the end of the day, that's what's going to come through. Number two on our list, finding new ways or new patterns to connect. So the story of course go if you always do what you always did, you're never going to get any new results. And surely if you are redesigning your career or if you need to just get a new job of the Corona situation, you might need to do something differently.
Yeah. So, Jasmine, what are you actually doing here? So how do you find new ways to connect? Well, it can get a little bit, I would say first of all, I could get a little bit tired because you get a bit overwhelmed.
In the beginning of Corona, there were so many invitations, there are so many new ways of connecting. And then I went to different seminars. I found new ways of connecting with people, got tired of that. But now being in the midst of this, I have done two things.
One of them has been to constantly connect through LinkedIn, actually, with interesting people that I have had conversations with. Yeah, it's even inspiring to hear about that. All your new connections. Yeah.
But deep, great, deep and meaningful conversations with a lot of women, mainly some men, and learned from their experiences. So that's one way we can dig more into that way of connecting. And the other one is actually that I started an MBA or a power MBA, which is a, they sell it in by saying it's a Netflix version of doing an MBA. Well, we'll see.
But what it does is it allows me to be connected with a range of people in a very new and interesting way. So it's a new way of getting inspiration, actually, on a daily basis, which is quite different from other things that I am working on or have worked on. I can't wait to learn more about all the things that you will be learning that's so exciting. I heard him, I was listening into a podcast earlier on, and I heard John Maxwell saying that he did a weekly or monthly lunch.
He invited, like, lunch and learn someone that he wanted to learn from. And at the end of the conversation, he would always ask the question, who do you know that I should know? So really, like, having a self finding new ways to connect is also reaching out to the people that you do know and see, is there another way to connect? Just ask the questions and see how can you even increase your network even further that way?
So during the month of November, what are you thinking? What could be new ways for new patterns for connections for you? So what I'm going to get better at is to, I've used LinkedIn, but I see some of my, some of the people in my network, they're so good at creating conversations on LinkedIn. So not just only through their own posts, but they're really enriching other people's posts by adding and discussing and sharing and putting on their part to it.
And I would love to do more of that. I think that's a great way, actually, of communicating with people in a new way. Beautiful. Number three, an artist is to practice gender and curiosity and removing the focus from yourself.
And this is a really useful way, especially if you cringe when you hear the word network and feel like it's all about needing to packaging your skills into a, you know, two minutes pitch, but removing that focus and really thinking about, well, how curious, how exciting to be speaking to this person. And you gave me this episode the other day, actually, because I was exhausted, really hakic and intense week in many different ways. And you said, and I was having a meeting and a podcast recording and you were saying, you know, just go in there and be curious about what they're doing. And it's such a great tip because it's such a good way to focus on what's important.
Yeah, and it's kind of a relief because it takes the way you're feeling that you have to perform. But it's quite, I can be quite grateful to just have the opportunity to listen and learn and find out you don't need to prepare anything if you're going to listen. I mean, maybe you're the first questions, but from there on, it's just digging deeper. So yeah, that's, that's a great and important point, I think.
And also, I find that we should look for people that are different from us and have different viewpoints that approach things differently. And this is something I tell leaders all the time, like when I encourage them to go out and ask for feedback, don't go to the person that you like the most, then feel the most comfortable with, which is, you know, a natural tendency when we want to ask for something difficult. But go to someone who sees things from a different perspective to pick up, how does this person see this? And I think the same goes for our network.
If we only meet with the people that already think the way we do, we're not really going to learn or see things in a new light. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And one challenge I'm thinking for the listeners could also be to when you are connecting, maybe virtually with a new connection is we tend to just look at the similarities, but try to connect by disconnecting, like try to connect if you see what I mean.
Yeah. I find, okay, what are they doing really differently from me? Or what is actually sticking out here? And maybe that can inspire you to do differently.
And I found actually a really interesting and high power question is to speak to your connections with a new friend of mine. And for example, saying, what is your greatest challenge and how have you tackled them? So having those kind of questions and dig into how they might be in that, they might be talking that in a similar or in a very different way to you. So I find that hugely providing a lot of connection, even though it might be or things that you're actually disconnecting on or doing very differently.
Yeah. And here, I think for our listeners, you see how the steps are building on each other. Because I think number three is going to be much easier to be done if you start out by being vulnerable and authentic yourself and start out by maybe not just putting on this facade of everything is perfect and I'm so successful with all these things, but really setting up the tone of, hey, let's just be honest and dig a little bit deeper, right? And having moved so much as both of us have done and me, well, you're relatively new in Atlanta and I'm quite new to Brighton.
But one of the beautiful things of living abroad and moving a lot is of course that we can kind of take things as they are in that country. It's not so much that you're bringing in the idea of something should be a certain way. But actually like, oh, how exciting. They do things like this in Brighton, rather than like that.
For example, they don't scream at you at the moving company in Brighton. People speak in really lovely ways. In New York, you would not have been like that. But no, but just really saying, but maybe try to give that same curiosity to people that are within your same culture, within your same country, kind of approach that with a beginner's mind as if it's new to you.
Yeah. And also, what can you learn from people? Maybe there is a part of their very different opinion that you can pick up and learn from. So talking about LinkedIn, I posted a quick question on our topic today.
And here is what I love about this new way of connecting. So within very short, I had three completely different women responding and sharing their insights and best ideas. So Heather leadership consultant working in Salt Lake City, and a business development director for the World Business Forum based in Europe, and Jessica, director of learning and development here in Atlanta. So who am I never met live?
So all of these three women quickly gave us a few different ideas that we can be using. And what all of them said, which I really liked, which resonated with me, is that they're having 20 minute virtual coffees with new connections. And I kind of like this 20 minute mark because it's not, you know, it doesn't take too much time. Also, Anna or Jessica was saying that she was having virtual lunches from her own network.
So I used taking time to have lunch together with her colleagues and friends. And they were all saying that they were joining and participating in different network groups that sort of have bloomed or flourished in the past year, and I think Heather was saying that she was part of Slack groups, etc, to mimic that former office conversations, a little bit more casual that we used to be having. And I thought, Anna shared something really insightful, which was really thinking about how do I help others to grow and develop their networks. And we'll talk about that later, but don't only contact your network and friends when you need something, but stay in touch and create that meaningful connection without having sort of a motive for it.
And I really love that because that's truly how we create meaning in our connections and going a little bit deep right say. So thank you ladies for your input and proving our point that network really does matter. Beautiful. So Victor, what about the practical challenge for the connection in November in terms of number three?
Well, what I'd like to encourage all of you, including the two of us, is just revisit your network right now. So if that's your social network, for example, via LinkedIn, and just look at the people you're connected to, how many of them are just like you and how many are different with different viewpoints, they look different from you, maybe they speak a different language from you, you know, what can you do to challenge yourself to grow your network outside of your comfort zone? That would be a challenge. That would be a challenge.
Perfect. Number four on our list is connect others and foster collaboration. Why is this so important? Why?
Well, the connection of others, there are so many levels of why connecting with others is important and beautiful. But what actually what I feel first when you say why is that so important is because it actually feels really good to help other people. We feel great when we have put someone in touch with someone and that will create something fantastic for them. And I was thinking about the Maxwell quote that you said in the beginning that they always says, you know, who should I meet?
And yeah, that's great. But maybe rather reframe that question, you know, to who should you meet? Like how can I help you to meet someone amazing in my network and put them in touch? And then you're giving two people a favor.
And then of course, that can lead to if you are in a career redesign position, it's just hugely beneficial to be of help to other people. Yeah. But it's in a sense that creating that dinner party feeling in your work network, you know, when you have a dinner and you invite people that don't really know each other and you're thinking ahead, like, how should I place them around the table? Who's going to sit next to me?
And then the conversation gets floating and people are having, you know, fun in a really lovely time. And I just love that feeling. When can we have these kind of dinner parties again? I know.
But so how do you create those networks, like through social media and different ways? And now actually we have, I'd say the opportunity of it's in a sense, it's easier to meet up with someone for a virtual coffee than before when we really had to travel to meet each other. And it's now really should be an opportunity for us to connect others. Absolutely.
And part of that was also to foster collaboration. And it's a little bit different than just connecting others. But it has that same idea of, you know, adding value and seeing that maybe this conversation that we're having right now, this first initial conversation with a new contact, might not lead to the intermediate job or an immediate benefit for either of you. But having the mindset of how can we collaborate?
How can I contribute and how can we collaborate? That just opens up so many more possibilities. And then if you add the previous steps, such as looking at what are the differences, then you also can say, you know, how can we complement each other? And how is that person doing something differently?
And I can add value to what they are doing. And again, I also just believe that this is a good way of doing it because it feels good. And it feels so much better than just coming up at someone to a networking party and giving your elevator pitch, it's just more genuine. You know what, it's helping to make this place a little bit, this world, as in this place, it's a little bit better by connecting people, right?
And I think it's important. And so with Franklin Covey, we do lots and lots of events. And I'm often a speaker, those events. But now in Atlanta, we've tried to do a new setup where we're actually inviting all these brilliant HR leaders as it happens in this specific forum and create a forum for them to network and them to do the talking.
And we're sort of just, I'm not doing any talking hardly at all, but just really tuning in and listening and learning and create. And the bus from that event is amazing. And all we do is sort of facilitate the platform, if you wish. Yeah, connecting people is beautiful.
And we have been called the natural connector. So we might have slide preference towards connecting. But number five and the final part of our list. And then it's really something that we find important to everything that we do.
And it's doing things consciously. And here we bring the consciousness to actually dedicate time for connection. But to dedicate time means that you actually need to plan, you need to look over your week and see when am I going to connect. I think that that is extra important now in the virtual world.
And both because we are meeting less people, naturally, we're not naturally connecting. And also speaking for myself, at least I find it more exhausting to connect with people because it is virtually. So planning this when I'm in a high energy state, when the energetic connecting Josephine is out there. That is great.
And then living up to those plans. But how would you plan it? Well, I think exactly what you're saying is when you reinforce that that often things such as connection or health and these things, we tend to think that those are not the things that should get into the calendar. But I think if you want to approach this a little bit strategically, why not schedule like at least 30 minutes per day if you're really in right now in the midst, you probably want to spend even more time if you're there looking for a new job and actively working on this.
But take only 15 minutes per day that you focus on connection. So maybe Mondays is how do I reach out to people in my network and just send a quick note? Someone I haven't spoken to Tuesdays is maybe posting something on LinkedIn that really like adds value. Wednesday.
And then it's true and authentic. Yes. Possibly vulnerable following our list, of course. Right.
So you see the trails are really picked like a little with a twist, not just saying, oh, I'm going to take 15 minutes pretty on connections. But what should each of these 15 minute times looks like? What's the ambition for that and have maybe 15 minutes per day to do that? So while connection might be something that is so natural to human beings, they might still require a little bit of effort from our part to make the connections happen.
Yeah. And especially if we are redesigning and growing our career. Yes. For sure.
Do you want to recap the list? Yeah, I was just thinking about that. So really, the very first point is to create great connections, show up as a true you, start by really connecting with yourself. Number two, Josephine, find new patterns to connect in new ways.
Number three is to practice genuine curiosity. So really go a bit deeper. Don't look for the things that you already know. Or is to connect to others and really sharing your connections and then look for collaborations.
And number five is dedicate time for connections. You need to do the work. It's not necessarily just happening on its own. So make sure it gets into your calendar.
So for all of you to reflect upon, how do you genuinely connect and what places, or what places you in an open mind and in a position where you are open for connection? So that might be something you're reflective of before making your plan. And then of course, connect with us on LinkedIn. Yes.
And share this podcast with anyone that might also love new and more ways to connect for sure. So thank you so much, everyone, for connecting with us. And thank you also. I don't think we say that enough.
Thank you, everyone who's listening to our podcast and who is sending us little messages in different forums. We really appreciate having you listening from wherever you are in the world. Yes. Thank you so much.
Please reach out. Let us know how your career redesign journey is going. If you are also embarking on it. Can't wait to speak to your next sign, which will be about health or wealth.
Let's decide. We haven't decided where to go next. Health or wealth. One of them is coming up.
All righty. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you. Bye.
Bye.