Carol:
Welcome to the Midlife Career Rebel, the podcast created for high achieving professional women to gain the clarity, confidence, and courage they need to go after and get the life and career they want. I'm your host, Dr. Carol Parker Walsh, lawyer, social scientist, brand strategist, executive coach, entrepreneur, and midlife career rebel. Each week you'll learn strategies to manage your mind, navigate the challenges of midlife, and take control of your career so you can thrive doing the work you love. So if you're ready to tear up that rule book and create your own, you're in the right place, and I can't wait to show you how.
Carol:
Hey, hey rebels, welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Dr. Carol Parker Walsh, and we have a phenomenal guest today that I'm excited to have a conversation with. Her name is Lee Caraher, she is an acclaimed communication strategist, and is the CEO of Double Forte, which is a national independent PR and communication agency. Lee has a reputation for building cohesive, high producing teams who have fun together at the same time, and she's authored two top selling books about positive and profitable work culture, and actually one of those books we're going to get in today, which is called The Boomerang Principle: Inspiring Lifetime Loyalty from Employees, which I think is so fascinating, particularly in this climate. So without further ado, Lee, welcome so much to the podcast.
Lee:
Carol, thank you so much for having, I should call you Dr. Carol, Dr. Carol, thank you so much for having me.
Carol:
You can totally call me Carol, we're friends here, we're all friends here.
Lee:
My sister's a doctor now and she's like, "It's Dr. Lizzy to you," I'm like really, all right then, all right Dr. Lizzy.
Carol:
I love that, I love that. So Lee, I would love just to give a sense of background and understanding of your journey to where you are now, before you created your agency, and the work that you are doing now, what was your story and your career story from where you started to the work that you're doing now, and what motivated that journey for you?
Lee:
Oh my gosh, well motivation was food. I like to eat. I graduated, I grew up on the east coast, I went to school in Minnesota, I went to Carleton College, which is just a wonderful institution, and if you have a rising senior please consider it, because I loved that place, and it's awesome. I have a degree in medieval history, Carol, which is really helpful, and my minor was performance voice, which is probably more helpful. But I knew that I didn't want to do... Both departments were very, "You should be a historian, you should be a singer," and what I knew about myself, even at 22, was I am terrible at doing one thing. I am. I mean, MBTI was just coming out, all that stuff, but I knew that I got bored. I'm bored easily.
Lee:
So I didn't know what to do, and my friend Ramona, so this is how I got my career, my friend Ramona, who we were on the same floor for four years in a row together, she was also a history major, but not a medieval historian, she said, "I think you should go into PR," and I said, "What is PR?" I had no idea. So I went to the career center, and there was a book, What is PR, so I read it and I'm like, yeah, I could do that. Literally that's how I decided to start my career, because I had to get a job, my parents, I'm the oldest, they made different decisions for my younger sisters, but I'm the oldest, they're like, "You're not coming home." I mean, this was a different age, right?
Carol:
Yeah, oh my goodness.
Lee:
So I was like, well, I need a job, that looks good, I can do that, I do that with all the other stuff I'm doing in my extracurriculars. So at that time, which was a long time ago, I decided to pursue agency work, because agency work is more set for training than internal work, and that's still true. You get much more training in an agency than you do internally, in this profession, until a certain point, and then going in house makes a lot of sense, and there's really four places in the country you could do it. So Boston, which is where I'd grown up, New York, which scared the crap out of me, San Francisco, five places, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Lee:
I wanted to get out of the Midwest, San Francisco is where my parents were, did not want to be close, they were separated at the time, I was like, I'm not going into that chaos. LA, I didn't want to be a publicist for stars, and that really, at that time, was what happened, so by process of elimination I'm left with Boston. So I called my father's best friend, who's a big time lawyer in Boston, I said, "Will you help me?" "Well, you need to write me a letter why I should help you, and why you think you'd be good in this career." So I wrote a letter, he sent it back with blood all over it. Okay, red pen, and I had to rewrite it, I rewrote it, and he said, "Yes, I'll help you." So then he set me up with 11 informational interviews in one week, I got six offers for internships, I took the one that gave me the most dollars, which was in high tech PR, which makes a lot of sense for a medieval historian, don't you think?
Lee:
So that is how I got into PR, and what I found was that I'm good at it, I like it, and I've been in communication, public relations, communications, executive communications, crisis communications, whatever, the whole thing, ever since. Which is very unusual, I get it. And then, let's see, started in Boston, moved to LA, did technology PR in LA. Got recruited to SEGA of America, the video game company, for lots of reasons, was there at the height of Sonic the Hedgehog, which was very exciting, and really a bellwether in my career. When SEGA decided to move forward with their last platform, the Dreamcast, I decided to leave, because we all knew what was going to happen to the company, there's no way it was going to sustain itself with that model.
Lee:
And then I was recruited back to my firm that I had been at in Boston to start their San Francisco office, I did that, they asked me to start a company, I did that. And then on 9/11, lots of things happened before 9/11 to lead up to this, but on 9/11 it was abundantly clear to me that I did not want to do that job. I had been on a plane on 9/4 from New York to San Francisco, that could have been me, I had two young children and I was working for people I really did not respect, and I was like, I can't do it, I cannot do the same.
Carol:
Wow.
Lee:
Literally 20 years ago. And at that time you couldn't work 2000 miles away from your CEO, if you were the chief communications officer.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
Said, I'm going to have to figure it out, and that's when I started Double Forte, because I had to, not because I wanted to, but I'm the breadwinner, I knew how to do this. And then my friend Dan, and colleague, we'd work together one, two, this was our third time working together, we came together and said, okay, if we have to start an agency let's make it one that we like to go to work to, because we hated going to work for the last one, hated it with the burning passion of the sun. And that was 20 years ago, and here we are. That is my journey, in a nutshell.
Carol:
Wow, that is quite a journey. But I'm curious though, I think, one, let me just say I think it's always fascinating that when I hear people talk about their career journeys, that a lot of life experiences, life events, create these pivots in our career.
Lee:
It helps, though, right?
Carol:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think some of us, it takes a life event to make the pivot, and some people need a life event to make a pivot when they probably should earlier. But the other thing was what made you feel confident with everything that you were going through, and after working for so long, that you could create your own business, that you could start your own company and run it smoothly?
Lee:
Oh, run it smoothly? Wait, wait, wait, I didn't say that.
Carol:
Successfully, I'll put it that way.
Lee:
Fast forward 20 years. Yeah, I mean, most companies don't make it past three years, as you know, and only less than 1% make it to 20 years, so it is successful, which I have to remind myself when it gets hard. I'm pragmatic. My husband was a chef when I met him, and I was an executive in PR, and he was never a person I thought we would, he was not my ideal husband had I been 27. But having been older I had realized, all those people who were ideal, aren't so ideal.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
And so I actually married a chef, I never thought I would marry someone who didn't have a white collar job, just wasn't in my head. But I did, and he realized we weren't going to see each other, because he worked from 2:00 PM to 2:00 AM, and I worked from 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM, and never the two shall meet, and so, "You make more money than I do, Lee, so why don't I stay home with the kids?" I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, what just happened?
Carol:
That's not the game book, that's not the plan.
Lee:
And my plan worked out, are you hearing me Carol? But here's a man I loved, and he's an awesome dad, and I made more money. So it was very pragmatic, I was like, okay, we don't have more money, I don't want to put all my money into this basket called termites and live paycheck to paycheck. I had run a business, a $25 million business for Interpublic that I basically built myself, on their dime, and so baby needs a new set of shoes.
Lee:
And that's been my experience, actually, around women in the workplace in general over 30 years of career, and I've been through now 1, 2, 3, 4 downturns, is that women are much more pragmatic than their male counterparts. In a situation that is dire, in a situation that's not ideal, they make pragmatic decisions for their families, if they have families, and most of them do some way, shape, or form, and they don't worry so much about the title. The money matters, but they don't worry about the title, and they don't worry about, all right, well that's the new rate. They go do their research and like, yeah, that is the new rate, they just take the job, and then they evolve the job from whatever that position is when times get better.
Lee:
Whereas, in my experience, the men who have come to me for help, they won't take a job unless it's a certain title, they won't take a job unless it's a certain amount of dollars, they won't take a job unless all these things, like, "I need to travel first class," I'm like, who the hell are you? You don't have a job, you don't have travel at all, and they have a harder time. Men, in general, I've found that men have a harder time in times of trouble than women do because women are very focused on baby needs a new pair of shoes. And that sounds so trite, but it's true.
Carol:
Yeah, yeah.
Lee:
And I think as you think about the last few years with COVID, all the things that happened in COVID were happening, they were all happening. People were underpaid, they were not being served while all these things were happening, and COVID just slammed us forward 10 years.
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
Nothing new came out of COVID except an acceleration of the trends that were happening anyway, and I don't know if this male-female differentiation trend changed at all, I haven't figured that out yet.
Carol:
Well, to your point, it goes to one of the things I always talk about with my clients is that it's so important for you to understand your natural gifts and talents and abilities.
Lee:
Yes.
Carol:
And I think that what you're saying is, as a natural talent, gift, and ability, if you have agility, flexibility, openness, some pragmatism, and listen, and can listen.
Lee:
You have to be a really good listener.
Carol:
Absolutely, that you can make things work. You can come into situations and hopefully either be able to reframe them in a way that fits you, or you make decisions that allow you to utilize those skills to be successful. Like you say, you have to because you have to.
Lee:
You have to because you have to.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
Well, and I think too, I mean, again, all these trends were happening before COVID, but think about all the things that happened inside COVID, we had George Floyd, we had Donald Trump, you have the war in Ukraine, we have all these things happening in it, and my hope, I believe this is true, the trajectory that we're on now, forget what everyone is like dooming the economy for, we're not in a recession people. Yes, there's inflation, but that's because we're spending.
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
We're spending, which makes inflation. If we don't spend, inflation goes down. It's us.
Carol:
Right.
Lee:
Is that the things that is the economy, the workforce, are finally learning that people matter, and that people can make many more of their own decisions as long as they back them up. And particularly for people of color, I mean, it is incredibly painful, it's incredibly painful, but there have been incredible strides forward in the last two and a half years for all people of color, even when sometimes it feels like we've taken three steps back.
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
And from my perspective it's a mindset, listening, what do I have to do? What's my impact going to be? How do I want to live? What do I have to look like? Who do I have to look in the mirror every night? That's what guided me when I started my company was, I said this earlier, how do we make a company we like to go to? Don't work for assholes was rule number one. Don't work for people you don't trust, basically. Don't work for people who don't respect you. Women work to stay relevant more than men do because we are more pragmatic in general, and I don't even know if this is supposed to be that conversation, but that's my experience. And NPR, it's all about being relevant. And our company has changed four or five times in models, has evolved dramatically in the tactics we use, but it really hasn't evolved at all in the services that we do, which is speak on behalf of our clients to get people to care about them, the end.
Carol:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I love what you said earlier about that what we've seen through the pandemic, definitely a more push toward a more human centric approach, that people are starting to care about what they do, things matter to them, and you're looking at this ability for women as well with their agility and flexibility in the workplace, and I think because of that is why we've seen this, what they're calling a she session, with so many women who have exited the workplace because they've had enough of this patriarchal model of working and not being able to have opportunities to flex in a way that makes sense for them, and on and on and on.
Carol:
And taking it to your book about building loyalty in organizations, inspiring employers, inspiring loyalty, I was thinking about this relationship between this mass exodus of women, this dearth of women leadership, for the ability to create spaces that make sense for them. What, through your research, or findings in your book, what have you found that is important for, or how can employers build that loyalty to keep women, and to inspire women and women of color to stay and to really want to be committed to the organization?
Lee:
We're going to need another podcast, Carol, but okay. So to me it's very simple. First of all, let's define loyalty. Loyalty is when you do something for somebody else that you don't have to do. Loyalty is not staying in a job you hate, loyalty is not staying in a job and not going somewhere else. I mean, the most loyal act an employee can do is leave when they're not inspired by the job they have. Even if they like the company, they don't like their role. Either they don't have the energy to find a new role in the system, or the system does not have a role for them, and that can be totally true depending on the size of the entity.
Lee:
I've had people come to me in 20 years and go, "Lee, I want to be a nurse." Well, we are not a hospital. "So I don't know, how can I support you? Do you have to go to school to get your pre-reqs?" "Yes." "Okay, well you can work for us and get your pre-reqs done at night, we'll figure it out." I can support them in their personal goals, and we have several people who have changed the careers two or three times since they left Double Forte, but they still show up for Double Forte all the time. They're referring business, they're referring people, they have ideas, they come back, all that stuff.
Lee:
So loyalty is something you don't have to do when you're getting paid. When you're getting paid it's a transaction. You show up, you get paid, that's the deal. It's not loyal to show up to work. It's prudent to show up to work, like all these people who are ghosting their jobs before they even show up, crazy talk, I don't understand. It will hurt them in the end, it will hurt them in the end, so that's loyalty.
Lee:
So the thing about loyalty is sometimes grass looks greener, number one, number two about loyalty is every person is unique. Every person has their own journey, every person has their own strengths, their own weaknesses, their own challenges, their own desires, and sometimes those desires are way outmatched to their ability. "I want to do this," well first you need to do all these things, because that is what's required. You can't be a heart surgeon unless you go through medical school, and you go through the internship and the residency and you save some people, then you can get your credential, that kind of stuff.
Lee:
So there are definitely qualifications, but if I know, Carol, what you want to do in life, what's your goal? Tell me where you are in your life, Carol. Well, I have two young kids, my husband's on the road all the time, and I need to work, I have to work, that's what the deal is. What matters most to me is that I have a good job, and that I'm contributing, but then I also have flexibility. So you might say, I'm going to park myself for a little bit while I do all these things, and get to the other side of kindergarten, because kindergarten changes everything, so as long as you tell me what it is you want to do, or you could have someone right out of college, "I don't know what I want to do, what I know what I want to do is I'm going to use these skills, everyone says you have got a great culture here, I love these clients, I want to work on them, and I'd like to see where it goes." That's enough, all right, here's what you have to do.
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
If you share, well one, you have to be willing to share and have a reputation for caring, because if you're just exploiting, people can smell that a mile away. But have a vested interest in who works for you, big company, small company, doesn't really matter, who is your manager? Do they have a vested interest in you? And then share what you'd like to do, and then have this, tell, "Here's what I'd like to get." Sometimes you don't know, sometimes you do, and then work with the manager to say, "Here's how you can get there. If you do all these things then I can promote you over to that group, and help you work with that group to get that job."
Lee:
It takes an involved manager, it takes a manager who has a strong ego in the fact that they don't care, a strong ego in the fact that they understand that the more people they help, the more power they have, not to diminish somebody. It also takes a strong person. Good careers are not served to you on a platter, period. Good careers are served to you by your own desire, your own imagination, and your own will, and when those things don't match up to where you are, that you get the hell out and find something new.
Carol:
Yeah. Yeah, so it sounds like, I love this idea that it's important for you as an employee to know what your values are and to understand what the values are of the organization that you're a part of to make sure there's alignment, so that you're not, as you put it, working for assholes.
Lee:
Unless you're okay with it.
Carol:
Yeah, unless you're okay with it. But it sounds like, if I had to summarize some of the things that you said, first of all, having this understanding and sense of loyalty, which is doing something you don't have to do, so you need to first have that mentality, and to be okay with that, as opposed to just, well I'm paying you, therefore, that's transactional, that's not what loyalty is.
Lee:
That's not what loyalty is.
Carol:
The second thing is knowing the goals, for the employee to know their own goals, but having that conversation as a leader, or an employer, to understand the goals and aspirations of the people that are working for them, and to also have a vested interest in that, a vested interest in your employee being successful, whether that means long term they're going to stay with you or not.
Lee:
Right, it doesn't matter.
Carol:
But if you're invested in them while they're there, it sounds like they'll be more loyal to you and give you so much more if you're open to having that connection where you actually care about them.
Lee:
And some of the most valuable, counted by dollars, employees I've ever had, don't work for me, and haven't worked for me for 12 years. And they're valuable because they refer clients, they're valuable because they give us testimonials, they're valuable, that someone gets inspired by, they're valuable because they send us candidates. Now I don't have to pay 45% to find a candidate. So the other thing about, it's not... Here's what we know, and I have all the statistics in this book, so you can go look at all the research on this. What we know about human people, as opposed to inhuman people, and there are some, is that people who feel appreciated outperform those who don't up to 30%. So let me say that again, people, and teams, who feel appreciated outperform those who don't by up to 30%.
Lee:
What does that mean? That means your teams that understand that they mean something to the organization, that they are contributing to the organization, and that contribution is appreciated, are more profitable for the organization than people who are just wondering what the hell's going on. If you, and there is so much data on this, Carol, coming out of Harvard, Wharton, Duke, London School of Economics, so much data on this. So I got a coach, and I worked with a coach for six months after I came back, and the first thing she did was a very professional in depth 360, and the thing that came back, so it was very complimentary except for this one thing, none of my people thought that I appreciated them. I'm like, what are they talking about?
Carol:
Wow.
Lee:
I am the nicest person they know, dammit.
Carol:
In my opinion.
Lee:
In my very informed, unbiased opinion. And what it really came down to is I never said please and thank you. And I grew up in a household that didn't say please and thank you, my father was a cardiac surgeon, and his point of view was please and thank you were implied, because if you ask please and thank you in the operating room, "Please give me the scalpel, thank you for giving me the scalpel," someone might die. That was his point of view, that was in our household, and I went into work with that. No one ever thought, I mean, it never occurred to me to say please and thank you because I didn't grow up that way. And this is my big glaring blind spot, that we all identify in these 360.
Lee:
So I learned how to say thank you and please, and our non-billable time, so we track all time, dropped by 5% when I started saying please and thank you, and I thought everyone was going to think I was a tool, truly, I think that's what I wrote in my book, "I thought everyone was going to think I was a tool." But I had to learn how to do it, and then I made them do it, and practice it, authentic appreciation, not for the fact that you like your shoes, but I appreciate that you always gave me a smile. I appreciate that you said thank you when I was just having a bad day. I appreciated that you went and got my lunch because you knew that I was so busy that day, things that actually made a difference to you, I forced that on everybody, everyone, "Oh God, here's Lee again with the appreciation." But I'll tell you, after every time we did it, and we did 12 weeks in a row, because you really have to create a habit, the energy in the room was sky high, and I saw the profit and loss option right there, 5% less wasted time. We sell time, that's what we do, we sell time.
Carol:
Yeah, yeah.
Lee:
That was amazing to me. So if you just say please and thank you, if you take a moment to say, what is that person's role? Explain that person's role, explain how that person has an impact on the next person, how we cannot do what we do without you showing up, even if it's virtually.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
And then say thank you for, not thank you for showing up, but hey man, look at what the team did together, we are moving our ball down the field, thank you. That's really all it takes.
Carol:
Yeah, simple.
Lee:
That's all it takes.
Carol:
Simple and powerful, yeah, yeah.
Lee:
But we're not taught that. Well, maybe they're taught that now, but I was not done that early in my career, so I had my own company, it was not until I'd been in my career for, let's see, '86, yeah, for 20 years until I learned that. No one ever told me that before.
Carol:
Yeah. So how can women bring more of that into the workplace? I know the culture is such where that's not going to be acceptable, that's going to be a challenging thing to do, but for those who are really trying to, in this day and age, to really redefine who they are, and they want to build that loyalty, what can they do, and what can women do, to help maybe foster this sense of building more loyalty so that it becomes a place where they want to keep them and they want to stay?
Lee:
And they want to come back, right?
Carol:
And want to come back, yeah, and refer people to come, yeah.
Lee:
My book is about coming back to a company you left, be open to it. Sometimes your best employees are the ones that came back to you, they come back better than then when they left you, that's for sure.
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
So loyalty starts with understanding that you got something out of the experience that you had with the company. So if your point of view is, so my son's 24, I don't think he likes what he's doing, but he knows, he's doing it in a good place, he doesn't know what he wants to do. I said, "Here's the deal, just get everything you can out of it. What are you going to learn? Write down what you're going to learn, and as soon as you stop learning, write down something else." So define what you want to get out of this job, and you have to put it in the context of your life. So if you're 24, you're single, you can go anywhere in the world, what do you want to get out of this?
Lee:
And his whole thing was, "I want to get two years of experience so I'm eligible for the entry level jobs didn't have enough experience for when I graduated," I'm like, "Okay, two years of work, all right, stay there for two years, that will get you where you want to go, if that's what you want." So define what you want to get out of the job. Define what, and then what are the conditions under which you were unwilling to work. I'm unwilling to work, so Meta, Facebook, just announced, well they had an internal memo that said, "If people aren't willing to work even more intensely than they have, they're not welcome at Meta/Facebook anymore," which as someone from the San Francisco bay area I'm just like, I don't know how those people could work any harder, but okay. I don't want to work that way. There are people who will. So, all right, don't go there. There are lots of companies that will not require that, who know that that is a short term gain for long term loss. It's been proven over and over and over again.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
So what are you going to get out of that job? Who are you going to be working with? What's the contribution you can make through that role? That goes down to the guy who picks up the garbage every day. People don't pick up our garbage, we can't get our job done. Thank you, thank you for making it nice. And then you can start the thanks and please. Be who you want to be as a manager, if you're not one yet. Model how you want to be modeled to, acted with, and 95% of the people will match you. Don't worry about the 5% who aren't, unless you're in physically, if you're in danger, get the hell out. And there are definitely dangerous situations you should not, if you feel like you're in danger, or you're at risk, goodbye.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
95% of situations are not going to be that. And then you can work through the other pieces. And this is where DE&I work has done so much in the last, particularly, well, forever, but really in the last three years, where really pushing organizations forward and understanding what inclusion and invitation means, acceptance means, and those things, and being willing to listen, being unwilling to lose people, so I'm unwilling to lose people just because we didn't try. I'm unwilling. If my people don't do their work, I can't keep them. We sell time. But we can offer a lot of flexibility, a lot of opportunity, a lot of things, but I'm unwilling to lose people that I spent a lot of time looking for, a lot of time training, without trying. And it takes listening.
Lee:
So what can women do? Depends who you are, but every woman can decide what it is they want to do, what it is that is important in this next period of time, so what's important in the next two years? Look around, a lot of women probably who listen to this show, Carol, are like us, they have parents who are elderly, have children who are growing, they're caring for somebody, even if they don't have their own children, total sandwich, we have lots of responsibilities, we're trying to be involved with politics, we're trying to be involved with our communities, we're trying to bring home a dollar, all those things, so what is most important right now? I believe that you can't make a bad decision if you understand what's most important with you, and then you make the decision understanding what trade offs you make, because if we have to work, and most of us, we keep hearing about all this money that's being transferred, that's still the 0.001% of the 1%.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
Most of us are going to have to work much longer than we thought, for me it's an extra 10, I didn't know I was going to have a child with special needs, I didn't know I was going to live through four downturns and be at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong things when we hit the downturn.
Carol:
Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah.
Lee:
I can't plan that stuff, but what I can plan is that I'm going to be in a position to have options, I'm going to be in a position to say, this is what I'm worth, I'm staying relevant, you have to stay relevant, you don't have a choice. People don't like it, mostly men don't like it. But if you're working, you have to be relevant. What does that mean? You have to find out what that means in your career path, because every career has a different relevance factor. For me it means I have to know what the hell TikTok is and how to use it, and how does it impact what happens in public relations, but other things it's different.
Lee:
You have to be relevant, and what I would say is you're in control of how you act. Control what you can control and you're way ahead of the pack, and then you can set a path for yourself that says, okay, when I get... I have three women right now on my team who have kids who are not yet in kindergarten, and we have set tracks for them that says once kindergarten happens, what do you want to do? Do you want to keep doing this? Because it has a different schedule, and it has different opportunities, and they're not available when they need to be for some clients, I'm like, "Okay, that's fine, that means this, do you want?" And they're like, "I don't know yet," I'm like, "Okay, we'll figure it out then." It's not worth it to borrow trouble, because you can't predict anything.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
If the last three years haven't been taught us we can't predict anything, I don't know what has.
Carol:
Yeah.
Lee:
But most of it's understanding who are we, who do we want to be, what's our impact going to be, and what do we have to get done? And if you think about the 11 and a half million people who lost their jobs, got laid off in 2020, and you think about who's gone back to work, there's still 2 million women who have not yet gone back to work in this country who could have.
Carol:
Yeah. So I do love the tips for women really to, in order to engage in these workplaces, in order for employers to have them to come back, there are things that they have to do, but for the women themselves, it's important for them to stay relevant, to really know what they want from their job, to know their non-negotiables, to know their contribution, and to really be who they want to be so that they can model the things that they want, if they're coming back into workforces and workplaces, that make sense to them, and that are aligned with who they are, and are aligned with what it is that they want for their life, for their family, and to move on, which is really great.
Lee:
That sounds very naive, doesn't it?
Carol:
Yeah, it sounds naive, but it's really powerful, it's really powerful thought. So I would like to ask you, what does being a career rebel mean to you?
Lee:
It means defining your own success. What is success to you? How can you look yourself in the mirror and say, yeah, I did it. All of us have a different answer, all of us have a different motivation, our motivation may change over time, our definition of success may change over time, but what is the definition of success to you? To me it was not having to work for people I knew were lying to me, because that impacted my own reputation. In the end all we have is our reputation, and it's our reputations that carry us through our career.
Lee:
So for me, being a rebel is being individual and figuring out what is success for me, and then figuring out how to plug what my definition is into the world around me, because I'm not a bubble, I don't have billions of dollars just to do whatever the hell I want, I have to work, so obviously I have to be relevant to somebody, but I can make those rules if I have the output that those rules demand. If I wasn't good in my job, if I didn't go over the top sometimes to provide great service, my clients could go anywhere else, a lot other places. But they don't. So I earn the right to have my own definition by my work ethic and my output and how I treat people, but I don't give up on that definition of what is my success.
Carol:
I love that.
Lee:
Yeah, we're such... I've done a lot of work on myself, I told you I did this coaching stuff, MBTI, enneagram, love languages of appreciation, strengths finders, I do all this stuff, and I give it to all my people too so that they can know themselves better. If they can know themselves better, they can advocate for themselves better and be better employees because they're happier. And like I said earlier, a happier employee, maybe it sounds mean spirited or Machiavellian, I want a happy employee, because they're more profitable, but I employed because they're more profitable.
Carol:
Yeah, right, right.
Lee:
And wouldn't that be a great world, if everybody's happy be doing this stuff.
Carol:
Well, I think too not only does it make for more profitability for the employer, but I think it makes for peace of mind, happiness, contribution, and greater income for the employee. I think it's a win-win because the more profitable the employer is, the more money that they can pay, that you can negotiate for for the people that are working there, so it really works hand in hand.
Lee:
That's the way it should be, right?
Carol:
Yeah, absolutely. So I love this idea of knowing what success means to you, but knowing it in a place where people, where that's valued, where that's respected, and where you can have that reciprocal relationship. I think that is so key and so powerful because yeah, we don't work in bubbles, it has to show up some place. But if you know yourself and you're taking control, and you're giving back and contributing in a way, it works for a really great give and take relationship.
Lee:
A lot of us later, middle life, are like, oh, what should I do now? Kind of stuff. I'm 58, I'm still wondering what I should do now.
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Lee:
And some of us have just worked until we got more comfortable in our own skin, I know that was my truth, I didn't really know what to do, and then I got comfortable in my own skin and I understood more about myself, and it just took me a while. But basically we have to take our experiences and reframe them for the future. Don't let your past define your future, reframe your path to create your future, and what did I take away from this experience? Man, that sucked. I didn't realize, like the frog that's in the water, the frog jumps into the boiling water and jumps out, the frog is in the cold water and gets warmed up, and all of a sudden they're dead because it boiled. A lot of us, I would guess the first thing is understand if your water's boiling or not. Understand what you're in, and then understand what you want, and then how do you get from where you're in to where you want. And it's a journey, you just can't flip the switch.
Carol:
Yeah, absolutely.
Lee:
Most of us don't have the benefit of flipping the switch. But it is in your control to control yourself. All right, Lee, you have to stop talking, I know.
Carol:
I appreciate, listen, I know this could be another podcast, but I appreciate everything that you shared, and just the insights. I love what you said, reframe your past to reframe your future.
Lee:
Create your future.
Carol:
To create your future, yeah, reframe your past to create your future, which I think is so powerful, and I think it's such a great place to leave this conversation. And yeah, we could have gone on for more and more, but thank you so much for being here, I'll definitely make sure to drop the links to your book so people can get access to it to get all that wealth of information, and to get onto your website to learn more. But thank you so much for being here today.
Lee:
Carol, thank you so much for having me, I so enjoyed talking with you and having long answers to your very short question.
Carol:
Thank you. Well listen, that's it for our podcast episode for today, rebels. Stay tuned next week when we'll have some more exciting conversations, and in the interim, have an amazingly rebellious week. I'll see you soon, bye-bye.
Carol:
Hey, if you're loving what you're learning on the podcast, then you've got to come check out the Career Rebel Academy. It's where you'll get the individual help and support you need applying the concepts of strategies you're learning here, and so much more. You'll be joined by a community of other rebels just like you, and I'll be there as your guide every step of the way. If you're genuinely looking to change the course of your life and career, I promise you this is the place you'll want to be. Just go to www.CarolParkerWalsh.com/career-rebel-academy. I can't wait to see you there.