Does.

Your brain keep you up at bedtime? I'm Katherine Nicolai, and my podcast, Nothing Much Happens: Bedtime Stories to help you sleep, has helped millions of people to get consistent deep sleep. My stories are family-friendly. They celebrate everyday pleasures and train you over time to fall asleep faster with less waking in the night. Start sleeping better tonight. Listen to Nothing Much Happens: Bedtime Stories to help you sleep with Katherine Nicolai on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, Jenna Kalopas here with the new season of My Overcomfort Podcast. What's Overcomfort all about? It's about inspiring confidence in all of us and choosing calling Overcomfort. Every Tuesday, I'll be having real and honest conversations. You'll hear it from me first before any cheasement hits your social media feed. Join me as I create a space where opening up is not only okay, it's encouraged. Listen to Over Comfort Podcast with Jenika Lopez on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, everyone, if you're listening right now, do me a favor and turn on your notifications and subscribe to the podcast because so many of you have been telling me that you haven't had access to the pod. And it makes me sad because so many of you are DMing me and messaging me, telling me that you're not getting notified when I upload new episodes. Now, I'm not sure why that is, but we have uploaded two new episodes every week on all platforms absolutely free every single week. I've done it for the last four and a half years, and I'll let you know if that ever changes. But right now there's two new episodes, Monday and Friday, every single week. I don't want you to keep missing out, so please subscribe and turn on your notifications, and I can't wait for you to listen to our latest episodes. It's important to know this. If you're accelerating your career and if you like that word accelerate, you will disrupt the status quo. As long as you're not doing anything illegal or dodgy or whatever it may be, it's okay to Russell some flemmage. You will. Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.

I'm your host, Jay Shette, and I'm so grateful that you've come back for this solo episode. It's that time of year where I like to get reflective and introspective because as it comes to the end of the year, it's so important to use our time wisely to think back as to what we would edit for next year, what we would improve, what we would remove, and how we're going to move forward. Now, today's episode is all about creative ways to accelerate your career in 2024 and do the work you love. How many of you know that you could be doing better at work? How many of you know, raise your hands, nod your heads if you can, not if you're driving. How many of you know that there's more you can bring creatively, innovatively, and productivity-wise to your workplace? And how many of you know that you want to bring love, passion, enthusiasm because there's a promotion that you're after, there's a shift that you're after, there's a transition that you're wanting. And maybe some of you are even wanting to quit your job and pursue your passion. If that's you, then this episode is for you.

If you know a friend who's going through a tough time period right now at work trying to figure it out, this is the episode for them. Now you might be wondering why the title has 2024 in it. You're like, Jay, it's 2023. I know it's November, but why are we talking about 2024? I'll tell you why. It's because 2024 begins now. Actually, every day you will experience for the rest of your life from now on in your life begins now. It all begins right now. And what's really interesting is that we often wait for the date to come around to make a change, to make an effort to think about it. We wait till the first of January to think, Well, what do I want to do this year? And by then it's too late. It's almost like you wake up in the morning and you think, Well, what do I want to do today? All of a sudden, that is a wasted thought. You've wasted time because you haven't given yourself the opportunity to go straight into the groove with being active, being energized, being engaged. But now you're spending half the day trying to figure it out.

It's the same as what we do for entertainment. We sit down to say, Well, what should we watch tonight? And you spend an hour and a half looking for something to watch. Maybe you watch 10 minutes of it, you don't like it, and you turn it off. How many times have you done that? We've all been there. And it's really interesting, isn't it? We wait till the moment in order to think about how important it is. Now, that doesn't matter. For some things, it works. And you may be thinking, well, Jay, how does that count as being present? Well, it does because you're valuing the present so much because you realize the effect it has on the future. That is what makes you want to be present right now. Now, there are five weeks left till the end of the year, and those can be used to prepare for next year's wins. They can be used proactively, be ready in your mindset. Now, by the way, at this time of year, I also take a break. I also look forward to resting and refueling and rejuvenating, and that's part of what's going to help me win for next year.

So I'm not taking away celebrating, having a good time. I love to do all that, and I will be doing all of that as well. But I also want you, for the time you still do have at work to think about this. The time that I am at work, I always use the end of year to plan for the year ahead. It gives me a head start next year when I get back after the holidays, and it stops me from trying to play catch up with myself. How many times do you come back in January and you think you're already behind? You think you've already missed out on something. You already think there's too many opportunities. You already think that, Oh, I should have been ahead. I could have done this. And then that perpetuates the thought of the year. That becomes the thought of the year. It becomes the focus of the year. I'm playing catch-up. I should have done more last year. I should have done this. I could have done that. And it's so important to get ahead for yourself. This isn't about you ahead of your friends, your colleagues, the people that you work with.

It's not about that. It's about you feeling in charge and control of your life. Now, this was inspired because I speak to so many organizations. Just this month I've spoken to some of the biggest corporate companies in the country, and I've been traveling around, speaking to them. And I'm sitting down with individuals that work inside these organizations. Some of them are even entrepreneurs outside the organizations. And I talk to people about stories of their experiences, why they stayed at a company for 30 years, why they left after three months, what made them switch career paths. And today I want to share with you some of my biggest takeaways as well, because I think people often forget that I also worked in the corporate world as well. And during that time, I also wanted to accelerate my career. I wanted to accelerate my career creatively. I wanted to accelerate my career professionally, and I wanted to find ways of being better and standing out. How many of you right now feel like you're always fitting in? You're not standing out. You're being unnoticed. No one's spotting your potential. People are not seeing you for who you are and what you can bring, and you're actually feeling like you just blend in.

If you're feeling that way, this is what you need to think about. So let's dive into number one. This is without a doubt, I would say this is the most important skill in life. Not just at work. This is the most important creative skill in life. And it will sound like it isn't, but I want you to give it a moment. So the skill is hidden behind this lesson, and the lesson is understand your company's algorithm. Now you may hear words like algorithm related to social media, related to the Internet, related to the online world, right? When we talk about TikTok or Instagram, everyone's always talking about the algorithm. Now if we really think about it for a second, all algorithm actually means, reading the dictionary definition, is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer. Now the part that I love about this is a process or set of rules to be followed in order to have success, in order for something to work. And what's really fascinating is that your company also has an algorithm. And the skill, the number one skill that I believe we all need is pattern spotting, pattern recognition, pattern analysis, and then actions based on that pattern analysis.

What I find in an organization is most of us are listening to what we're told to do to succeed, and missing what we see is what makes people successful. Let me take that again. Most of us are listening to what we're told to do to help us succeed, and missing what we see helps people succeed. I'll give you an example. When I was working in the corporate world, we were told that to be really good at our careers, we had to get good at Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. And that seemed like a fairly small goal. It felt fairly reachable for most people, and it probably wasn't challenging enough. But then when I looked around at the people who were giving our presentations, who were talking, who were guiding us, that wasn't their skill set. Their PowerPoint didn't look the best to me. Their Excel spreadsheet didn't look the best to me. All of a sudden, the pattern that they were saying and sharing and the pattern that they were living were two different things. And that's when I started to take notice and think, well, what has that person done at this company to succeed?

What have they done? And by the way, our minds generally wired for negativity will come up with all sorts of reasons. Oh, they've been doing something dodgy. Oh, they've just been sucking up. Oh, they've just been putting in extra time. Our mind will come up with easy answers in order for us to not have to do the hard work. Our mind often tells us everyone else got there easy so that we don't have to do the hard work. Our mind makes other people's sacrifices and shifts and challenges seem easy so that we can avoid hard work. So I want you to take a real look at this. I want you to really pay attention to this. Understand your company's algorithm. Spot the pattern. What is working for people? What is shifting for people? Look at the pattern, not the person. We look at the person and we think, I don't like them. I don't like their personality. I don't know how they ever made it there. I don't get it. Don't look at the personality. Look at the pattern. What is the pattern? What I found in the companies that I've worked in is that it was about who you know.

For a lot of people, it's about who you know. Now, you may sit there and say, Well, I don't want to know that person. Well, then chances are that we won't do well at that company. Who do I need to know? Another thing that I saw is that it was people who were able to go above and beyond. The people who were succeeding were not the people who were doing the bare minimum, were not the people who were shirking responsibility. It was people who were able to take responsibility in areas that matter. In areas that matter to the company. This is a big point. Pattern spotting is not just about spotting the pattern that makes sense to you. It's spotting the patterns that make sense to the company. So, for example, when I joined this corporate company that I worked for, I noticed that the pattern was in line of growing the digital side of the business. That was the area focus. That's what they wanted to build on. And if I started to notice that, it would have made no sense for me to not give my energy to that area. That is so important to not let go of that energy to build and develop that area.

If the company is focusing on digital focus, is focusing on certain aspects of the business, it's so important that your energy and your skills get directed there as well. So how do we study patterns effectively? Number one, select your case study, i. E, people who get promoted. And equally, you could study why people don't get promoted. I literally did that. I looked at people who are succeeding, and I looked at people who were failing. Then I analyzed why it was, again, not focusing on personality traits, but focusing on the pattern of how they operate inside the organization. And third, this is really important, emulate, don't imitate. When we're imitating, when we try and be like someone, when we try and shadow someone's personality, it doesn't work. We have to emulate that energy. Now, you may or may not be sitting there going, Jay, well, this sounds like I'm playing games. It's not. It's pattern spotting. Everything in the world, whether it's investing, whether it's real estate, whether it's a healthy relationship, life is all about pattern spotting. What does it mean when you're looking at how someone builds good habits? It's pattern spotting. When you're analyzing someone's discipline, what are you looking at?

It's pattern spotting. Look at the patterns inside your organization. Some of these patterns become easier to track through technology. You can see how many emails someone sends. You can see the type of conversation that they leave to have on a phone call versus an email. You can see the meetings and the way people navigate them. This is number one.

Do you lay awake, scroll, and toddle in, at bedtime, or wake in the middle of the night and struggle to fall back to sleep? Start sleeping better tonight. I'm Catherine Nicolai, and my podcast Nothing Much Happens: Bedtime Stories to Help You Sleep has helped millions of people to get consistent deep sleep. I tell family-friendly bedtime stories that train you to drift off and return to sleep quickly. I use a few sleep-inducing techniques along the way that have many users asleep within the first three minutes. I hear from listeners every day who have suffered for years with insomnia, anxiety at nighttime, and just plain old, busy brain who are now getting a full night's sleep every night. I call on my 20 years of experience as a yoga and meditation teacher to create a soft landing place where you can feel safe and relaxed and get excellent sleep. Listen to Nothing Much Happens: Bedtime Stories to help you sleep with Katherine Nicolai on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Laverne Cox. I'm an actress, producer, fashionista, and host of The Laverne Cox Show. You may remember my award-winning first season? I've been pretty busy, but there's always time to talk to incredible guests about important things. People like me have been screaming for years. We're going to watch the.

Supreme Court. What they're doing is wrong.

What they're doing.

Is evil. They will take things away. I can only hope.

That Dobbs is that like Pearl Harbor moment. Girl, you and I both know what it took to just get through the day in New York City and get home in one piece. And so the fact that we're here and what you've achieved and what I've achieved, that's momentous. It's not just us sitting around complaining about some bills. The only reason that you might think, as Chase said, that we're always miserable is because people are constantly attacking us and we're constantly noticing it. Listen to The Laverne Cox Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Be sure to subscribe and share.

Now, number two, linked to the first point, but identify your organization's growth area. Now, this will likely be a technology. It could be AI. It could be a social media platform. It could be augmented reality. It could be communication through technology. Identifying your company's growth technology is probably one of the biggest investments you can make. Right now, people who are able to use ChatGPT effectively are massively effective in our company. It's a useful skill to have. And when I see someone diving into that, when I see someone engaged with that, it's exciting for me because I'm thinking to myself, Okay, this is a person that's understanding this platform and this app, and I now know that we have someone on the team who's thinking about that. This applies to social media too. If someone's able to focus deeply on a platform and understand how it works, that's really useful. This is what I was. I remember when I joined the corporate company I worked at, they were working on social media as a big part of their digital strategy. So inside the digital growth area, there were many different things. There was crypto, there was VR, and there was social media.

Now here's the personalization part. Crypto wasn't exciting to me at the time. By the way, this was 10 years ago before crypto was relevant. Now you may say, Jay, you're an idiot. If crypto was exciting to you, it would have been very lucrative. Sure, but I didn't enjoy it. It's so important that I'm spotting the growth area in my company that I love. Why? Because I'll Excel at it. Why? Because I'll perform better at it if I'm aware of it. Let me focus first on that. Second of all, now that I've focused on that area, that's why I chose social media. For me, studying and learning about social media was so much fun. It was so exciting. It was so interesting. It was so enthralling, genuinely. I was a little kid every day trying to learn about this new thing that I knew nothing about. I knew nothing about. I want you to think about it. What do you know nothing about, but that is a growth area in your company? Most of us have never read a book after we finished college. Most of us have never tried to learn about a new platform since we finished college.

What can we do in order to change that? How many of us are going to allow ourselves to focus on a growth area inside our organization that could make all the difference? Right? Okay. Number three. It's important to know this that if you're accelerating your career and if you like that word accelerate, you will disrupt the status quo. And I just have to say this because I have to. As long as you're not doing anything illegal or dodgy or whatever it may be, it's okay to rustle some feathers. You will. I remember that there were senior people in my organization who were getting weirded out by why this young person was trying to make a change, trying to do things differently, coming up with creative ideas, pitching them, and he was upsetting them. And by the way, that was very weird for me. It's amazing to me how some new person like me could intimidate someone who'd been at the company for much longer than me. And it's really uncomfortable to go through that, but I want you to know that it's part of the path. Learning to be respectful, learning to let your ideas talk for themselves and be disruptive and innovative is the key.

Disruption and innovation is not an act of ego. Disruption, creativity, innovation is not an act of ego. It's not about being better than someone. It's not about showing you are better than someone. It's not about making someone else look bad. It's about presenting your ideas in such a way that they are unstoppable, that someone can't ignore them. That's what we're after. That's the goal of what we're trying to do and what we're looking to do. And I think it's so important that we remember that, because it can so easily and very quickly become an ego battle where it's now us against the person. Notice how everything becomes personal. We make it about us against the person instead of making about the pattern, instead of making about the technology, instead of making it about the creativity. Step number four. Let me ask you this. If I told you I was going to invest in 100 hours of training for you, coaching, how would you decide how to spend that 100 hours on things you're good at, things you're average at, or things that you are bad at? How would you decide to spend that 100 hours if you had the ratio of figuring it out.

So for most people, a lot of people will go, 33, 33, 33. Just make it balanced. It makes sense. Some people will say, Well, 10 and 10, 80. I'll spend most on what I'm bad at. Some people will say, Okay, well, I will spend the most on what I'm average at. So let me invest in the middle part. Some will say, Let me invest in what I'm good at. Now, there's no right or wrong answer, but when they studied the healthiest, wealthiest, and wisest people on the planet, they found that their breakdown was 80, 10, 10 or 100, zero, zero. The healthiest, wealthiest, and wisest people in the world went all in on their strengths and didn't focus as much on their weaknesses. So if they were already great at something, they invested in it because then they would become world-class in it. If you are a phenomenal creative, if you're phenomenal with the technology, if you're a phenomenal strategist, go all in, read every book, go on every course, go on every program, you will become unstoppable. Now here's the caveat. When it comes to your hard skills, focus on your strengths. When it comes to your soft skills, focus on your weaknesses.

If you're weak in empathy, in compassion, in communication, you must work on it. But when it comes to your hard skills, strategy, Excel, powerpoint, leadership. Make sure that you focus on your strengths and go all in on them. Right? Become unstoppable. Become phenomenal at those hard skills. Focus on your strengths. See, there's this beautiful quote by Albert Einstein where he said that everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it's stupid. And so many of us are fishes trying to climb a tree. So many of us are birds trying to swim. So many of us are giraffes trying to be lions. So many of us are lions trying to be zebra. And the list goes on, right? But our zone of genius, our zone of flow, our zone of connection with ourselves and being aligned with ourselves where we become unstoppable should not be ignored. There's this incredible conversation that I talk about often between Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. And Steve Wozniak goes up to Steve Jobs, and he says, What do you even do? He says, What do you even do?

You're not a coder. You're not an artist. You're not a marketer. What do you even do? And Steve Jobs says, Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra. Now we'll take the ego out of that for a second. But what that means is that his ability was not to play the cello, the bass, or the violin. His ability was to bring it all together. What is your ability? Play to that. Work to that. Show that off at work. And this is a big part of it. Demonstrate it. A lot of us want to defend our strengths, but we don't demonstrate it. We want to be rewarded for a strength we haven't shown yet, but we're not demonstrating it. This was one of the biggest mistakes I made in the workplace where I was hoping someone would spot my talents rather than me being able to demonstrate them. Find creative ways, creative outlets. Take on an extracurricular at work. Take on a group project at work. Display it. Show it. People will win then when they do things to help their workplace win. Do the thing that actually helps your workplace win, not just that feels comfortable and makes you feel busy.

A lot of people on our teams in the past in companies used to organize things that were easy for them, but the company didn't really value it. Again, I'm sharing this. If you want to win in any area, even if you're an entrepreneur, if you're an entrepreneur, you have to do this. You have to focus on your strengths. So many entrepreneurs that I know are forcing themselves to be influencers or so many influencers are now forcing themselves to be CEOs. And both of those are taking away from the world your gift. Now, Fifth, it's so important to creatively network. Now, what is creative networking? A lot of people think networking is going to events and handing out your card. It isn't. Creatively networking is making sure that you reach out to everyone you want to learn from in your organization. Now, you may send a hundred emails. I remember I used to email a managing director every week, maybe even 2-3. And maybe out of the 50 managing directors I emailed, maybe only two or three actually met me. But guess what? Those two or three changed my career. Now you may say, Oh, that seems desperate.

I don't want to be reaching out to 50 people. I feel uncomfortable. I have found that the person playing the game of numbers will never lose. If you knock on a hundred doors, you will get 1-10 to open. If you knock on a thousand doors, you will get 1-100 to open. If you knock on a million doors, et cetera, you get the point. A lot of us are knocking on two doors, and when those two doors don't open, we feel disheartened. Some of us are knocking on 20 doors and then getting exhausted. The more doors you knock on, the more we'll open up. It's just numbers. It's just numbers. I remember the day after I realized that I was struggling at a point in my career, I sent a thousand emails to everyone I knew. Creative emails, personalized emails, focused emails. How are you using technology to stay connected to people? I love using social media to stay connected to people that I love and appreciate. Networking is not a technique of being sleazy, and it's keeping in touch with people you deeply care about. But if someone's in touch with me consistently, effectively, healthily, then it becomes so much more easier to collaborate and connect.

I want to share with you a couple more things. Number six is FlowState. Flow is a book. It's a brilliant book. And FlowState is a state where we see artists, celebrities, authors, athletes all in the zone. How many times have you seen LeBron James and Thore in the zone? Or you saw Beyonce and Thore in the zone, or in the zone? Or you saw whoever it is that you admire and respect, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is in the zone. And when we're watching these people, we always think, well, they're special, they're gifted. Really, they've just tapped into flow. And flow state is where your challenge meets your skills. Often what we experience is our challenges above our skills, which is where we feel disheartened, we feel unmotivated, we feel depressed. When your challenge is above your skills, it can be demotivating. And then some of us experience the opposite, where our skills are above our challenge. We feel bored. We feel lethargic. We feel like we're not curious anymore. So what Flow state in the book, what Flow says is we have to find a state where our challenges meet our skills. So at any given time in your career in 2024, ask yourself, do you need to improve your challenge, increase your challenge, or do you need to increase your skills?

Now if it's your challenge, what are you going to do to challenge yourself? Are you going to increase the scope? Are you going to increase the scale? Are you going to increase the level of responsibility? What are you doing to challenge yourself. Challenge doesn't mean doing something entirely new. It could mean doing something bigger. It doesn't mean doing something bigger. It could be doing something with more detail. It doesn't mean just doing something with more detail. It could be doing lots of harder tasks and doing less. It could be doing more. Challenges can look like so many things. What's your challenge in 2024 that you're taking on? And what's the skill you need? What's the skill you need to invest in? I want you to reflect on that, because literally those two questions could transform what 2024 looks like for you. Number seven, to really be creative and accelerate your career, connect things that seem unexpected. The best solutions come out when people do unexpected things. Steve Jobs connected calligraphy and computers. Dyson connected art and Diffusers. Like art and hairdryers and diffusers and vacuum cleaners. Whoever ever thought that their vacuum cleaner would be good looking, right?

It's amazing when two worlds collide. What two worlds are you trying to connect? Steve Jobs said, Creativity is just connecting things. What are you connecting? Thank you so much for listening to today. I wish you an amazing, amazing rest of the year. Please come back for two episodes. Turn on your notifications. Subscribe. Do not miss out. And I can't wait to see you again for another episode. The Street.

Stoic podcast is back. We are combining hip hop lyrics and quotes from some of the greatest to ever grace a microphone. It's a line from Lauren Hill, and she says, Don't be a hard rock when you really are- -again. Along with ancient.

Wisdom from some of the greatest.

Philosophers of all time. Seneca, right? And he says, Your mind will take shape of what you.

Frequently.

Hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impression. Listen to Season 2 of The Street Stoic Podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do a flirtatious gambling double agent in World War II? An opera singer who burned down a nunnery to kidnap her lover, and a pirate queen who walked free with all of her spoils have in comment. They're all real women who were left out of your history books. You can hear these stories and more on the Womannica Podcast. Check it out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen.