Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Live your life making change possible. Let's start the show. Hi and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader. I'm so happy to welcome dear friends to the podcast today Vanessa Iloste and Vanessa Teo. Welcome, hello, jean.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Hello, thank you for welcoming us, oh.

Speaker 1: 1:22

I'm so happy Vanessa and Vanessa have both been on the podcast before and so I won't go into a long intro. You can listen in to their episodes. But today they've come to talk about their wonderful podcast that they host, Career Transitions, and to share the learning from that podcast. They're both senior HR directors who have long careers in leading HR in global organizations and in their podcast they've been exploring the impact that career transitions, and particularly leadership careers in transitions, has on each of us.

Speaker 1: 2:06

And of course, we all, as leaders, have many transitions. We go from one role to another, from one company to another, transitions across sectors, transitions we didn't seek like redundancy, and transitions we sought getting a promotion. From my years of coaching, I've seen that every leadership transition brings about uncertainty, often increased imposter syndrome and, of course, the risk of not being the leader we want to be or not being able to deliver the business goals. And in their podcast, Vanessa and Vanessa have interviewed experts and had conversations with each other to help us to learn how to navigate career transition successfully, and they've kindly agreed today to share some of their learning with us. And I welcome you again five seasons into the podcast and I wondered if it would be good to start with some of the practical lessons that you're learning from your guests and from your own inquiry and across all the guests that you've interviewed. What are the most common practices or habits that you've seen help people thrive in transitions?

Speaker 2: 3:24

So I just wanted to first and foremost thank you, Jean, for basically your support in setting up our own podcast. We owe you a lot because you were the person who basically gave us the training and the confidence actually for us to start our own journey. So we want to say a big thank you to you and I want to say that it has been much bigger, I think, for the two of us in terms of learning, what we would have expected. I think we were practitioners and at the time we started, we had 50 years of collective experience, and what is interesting is that we have learned so much over the last two years doing this piece of work and we're so blessed to have the podcast going on. So the thing that we would like to share and I think it's quite basic, but I think it's important to remind ourselves about this is the fact that it's super important to start with listening and observing when it comes to career transition.

Speaker 2: 4:22

It might feel very obvious, but from all the interviews we have had, this is a theme that has come back, and the quality of the listening and the quality of the observance is something that, or the way you observe, is something that people have really stressed. So when we prepared this recording with you, we thought about the episode we had with Eugene, in which you actually advise people to suspend their judgment, and I think this is very powerful, the idea of which is not easy, which is observing, noticing, paying attention, but not going straight to a conclusion about whether it's wrong, whether it's right, whether you know I've never seen that before Just keeping it in the air, which is the concept of it, and making sure that you can take appropriate time to reflect and also to bring it into the ecosystem of the rest of findings you have, so that it can actually make sense. So this is the first one we wanted to share with you.

Speaker 1: 5:33

Thank you for that. I think that's so important because there's a tension, I think, going into a new role, a feeling that you need to prove yourself. But actually it's more important to go in and listen and observe, because those proving yourselves you might end up doing something that's going to not work further down the line because it's not aligned with the culture or it doesn't fit into the organizational system. So, yeah, that's really powerful. And just leading on from that a bit, leaders are often making international or cross-industry transitions. What are the lessons from those types of transitions that you've noticed? That might be different from, perhaps, a transition within an organization.

Speaker 3: 6:18

Yeah, jean, we certainly see quite a lot of those, and, in fact, through our podcast episodes, we also interviewed guests who made those transitions. And even Vanessa and I both of us also made some of those transitions ourselves. But one of the things that we've noticed is that leaders who move across countries or industries, and who do it successfully, share many positive qualities. First, they're prepared, they make courageous and bold moves and decisions and, very importantly, they are resilient. You know, what comes to mind is something that one of our guests called Frank Koo. He was on season four of our Career Transitions podcast and he reflected on how much groundwork he had to do in order to understand a new culture before stepping in, and so it reinforced to me that transitions are really less about that perfect plan but a lot more about the determination to stay systematic, resilient and bold throughout your own growth. And it also got me to reflect on my own moves when I've moved between different countries in Singapore, the US, indonesia, china and really observing and respecting the culture is of utmost importance. So we need to really challenge ourselves, to get out of our comfort zone, our cultural bubble, and really seek to learn, to listen and then to take action on things that we're observing. I'll just share a light example of these cultural nuances.

Speaker 3: 7:45

When I was in China, even a simple taxi ride can become a masterclass in learning about cultural pace. So conversations are fast in the taxi in China, decisions are sharp and there's always this sense of urgency. But then when you take a taxi in, say, indonesia, you learn that things are a lot slower. The way that you speak, the pace of how you speak, needs to be slower and more patient with the driver, and it's not because things move slower, it's because, culturally, you need to understand the right pathways and the right relationships in order to get things done pathways and the right relationships in order to get things done.

Speaker 3: 8:27

So these are the small cultural cues that I think taught me this piece about adaptability, but also learning that the pace at which you move might be different depending on the culture that you're at. And so what Vanessa Elaste was talking about earlier about really observing, listening, observing before you take action is really important. Erin Myers talks a lot about this in her book, the Culture Map, and really shows how cultures vary in terms of communication, decision-making and trust, and living through it really made the book really real for me, and I think it was also a reflection of what many of our guests, when they came onto our show, actually talked about.

Speaker 1: 9:07

Thank, you for sharing that. There's such a beautiful I don't want to call it tension, because I think it's a both and about doing the groundwork before a big transition like that and still going in and listening and waiting and still going in and listening and waiting, so doing that groundwork, being somewhat prepared, but still noticing the cultural differences, whether it's in the organisation or in the country that you've moved to as well.

Speaker 1: 9:37

So it's really a both, and isn't it? In that space, this is not news to anybody, but the world of work is changing at a pace that we can't really imagine. We never could have imagined, I think, at the moment and there's a potential for this, creating transition for all of us Certainly learning new skills. We all need to be embracing AI, otherwise we will be left behind. It's about learning new roles, really being open, I think. What are you learning about the future of work, both from your own experience of being HR directors, seeing what's happening in your own organizations, and also from the conversations you've had on the podcast.

Speaker 2: 10:21

So it's very interesting. This week I was asked through the Career Transition podcast to basically help some of my HR colleagues to prepare some talks for their board meetings and they wanted me to help them with research papers on AI and agentic AI. We had a conversation together it was two different people who had the same thing to do and we realized that we were so much in depth in this Actually, it was a McKinsey article, very high quality article in this agentic AI that we felt like we had missed the big picture, and the big picture was around the soft skills. So we were talking so much about how much automation is going to come, the needs for us to be able to use all this new technology, and then in the conversation we say well, at the end of the day, what really really matters and what is not going to be replaced, we believe is going to be replaced with more difficulties and soft skills. So I think that the human aspects of things is really key. I can see it.

Speaker 2: 11:30

You know, it's not easy for some of my colleagues in the new generation and I say it with compassion to actually come and participate to the workplace, because some of them, you know, find it hard to interact and even the eye contact is not an easy thing for them to do.

Speaker 2: 11:49

So I think it's very, very important that we actually we need to upgrade ourselves, for sure, but let's not forget to continue nurturing these soft skills, and we had a very good example in the show when we actually we did one season in residence at Essex Business School, which was really, really nice. We were able to see the students and to see the teachers, the professors, and one of the professors, sonia Prokopec. She was telling us about the empathy as a competitive edge for the future. She really really believes that empathy. She's specialized in the luxury industry and she was saying in luxury for the clienteling it's going to be. You know all about empathy and the way you are making these people feel so exceptional and so good about themselves and so good about their relationship and their experience. It was a good reminder for me this week what I was helping my colleagues to do to make sure that in the conversation to the board, these two individuals were able to put a focus also on the human aspects of things.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Yeah, this is so important and I've seen one study that did a meta-analysis of the future of work and it came back with the same outcome empathy, saying that actually, if all our attention in the future of work goes towards the tech skills and the AI skills, we are going to lose that human connection and that is baked into our systems through millennia that we are relational beings, that we connect with each other, and if we lose that we'll really mess this up. So we need to stay. So it's a great reminder, thank you, a great reminder, thank you. I guess, linked to that, that often when we are having a career transition, we actually have to reinvent ourselves a bit. We have to shift who we are, a bit to kind of move into that future, whether it's a future work or a future role. Have you seen any strategies that people have used to reinvent themselves successfully?

Speaker 3: 14:03

Yes, yes, certainly, when you go through these career transitions, the mindset of how you go about putting in those fresh ideas into that career pivot become even more important. And this was one of the things that really stood out for us when we interviewed one of our guests called Eric Sim and he was featured on season five of our podcast. And Eric Sim is a former managing director of an investment bank and went on to be a thought leader in a space of leadership and he spoke about how these creative outlets actually do spark fresh ideas. That helped in his own professional transition. He gives the analogy of a career portfolio as having like a happy meal. So you have your hamburger as your main meal, which is your main job, but you also have the sides, like your fries and your Coke or your drink, that form kind of like the side dishes and it's almost like in your career. Think of having that main portfolio career but also having interests and hobbies and other experiments that you do outside of work that help to fuel your professional identity.

Speaker 3: 15:20

And I thought that that was such a powerful analogy. And some of my best insights come from outside of HR, in a completely different domain, and I thought that that was a very, very powerful analogy by Eric, and it also reminded me of some of the work that Aminia Ibarra did in her book called Working Identity, in which she talks about having different prototypes of yourself, and that can be done through having experiments, projects, hobbies. In a way, what it does is that it tests you and it helps you to learn in a different way and ultimately gives you the ingredients in order to make some of these bigger reinventions that might come along the way in your career. You know, as I reflect on this question too, if I think about our own transitions Vanessa Elaste and me, and what we did as part of the Career Transitions podcast, it was, in fact, also a pivot for us to reinvent ourselves, and for us it was learning a brand new skill, stepping out of our comfort zone, having conversations with people we would never otherwise have done or have met, and each guest gave us new insights and stretched our own thinking.

Speaker 3: 16:30

So, in a way, the Career Transitions podcast itself was a kind of a transition for us and one that I think taught us to be more curious, to listen more deeply and to keep on experimenting. So when I think about how people going back to your question about reinventing themselves. I think it's about experimenting, it's about drawing inspiration from outside of your field to ultimately craft what that transition and what that future would look like.

Speaker 1: 17:03

Oh, I love this so much, this idea that creativity helps us in our day jobs, if you like, for want of a better thing and you are both living examples of doing this, and it's not just the podcast. You both have a lot of interests outside of that and you are curious beyond it, and I've been also reading a lot of the podcast. You both have a lot of interests outside of that and you are curious beyond it, and I've been also reading a lot of the research. So Martha Beck is talking a lot about this the role creativity plays in helping us to think differently about lots of bits of our lives. She's talking particularly about how it helps us with anxiety, and it's a challenge for us. I think we have to make a big commitment to this at the moment, because most people's jobs are so big that by the time they get to the weekend, the idea of doing something different or creative or new is often really challenging, because there's a temptation to just lie down and try and recover before Monday comes again.

Speaker 3: 17:59

And yet what I'm seeing, what I experienced myself, what I witnessed in you, what I read in the research, is that making time for creativity, even when we're exhausted, will help us in the long run and be very good for us, it's true, but you need to have a group of a network or a group of friends or people who will give you that edge, you know, and who will come in and remind you and keep encouraging you to keep doing that, because it's very easy to just say you know what? I'm not going to experiment anymore, I'm not going to give this an extra time that I need to on a precious weekend. So for Vanessa Iloste and I, it's encouraging each other to keep pressing on and doing things that we truly enjoy and love. That's outside of work, but it ultimately helps us to be better in our professional lives.

Speaker 1: 18:51

As I said in my intro, career transitions, I think, always increase imposter syndrome because we're out of our comfort zone, we're into something new, increase imposter syndrome because we're out of our comfort zone, we're into something new and there comes up some kind of creeping doubt about oh, can I really do this? And I've been with chief execs moving into new roles you know me myself going into new roles, so many people in their careers I've never seen one where some form of imposter syndrome hasn't shown up. So I'm curious about how you're seeing this and any ideas you have about how we can work with it, work through it.

Speaker 2: 19:32

So I think that this is one of the questions that came very, very often in the conversation we had with Vanessa, and the guests were very gracious in the sense that they open up about their difficulties, and I was very touched myself by some of the ones we had just met, you know, a couple of days before, and they were ready to let us know about what had happened. The first thing that I believe in is the fact that it's very, very normal and natural, because it's the brain telling us about the disconnect between what you have not yet been, you know, identified as an expert on, versus you know where you are at. So it's good news in the sense that it means that something in the neurons I don't know how it works is giving us the intellectual honesty that we are not yet confirmed or we are not yet identified as the person you know who is in charge or who is having this role. And because it's a transition, it could happen that someone else would have done it. It could have happened that you know the person would have not been promoted and someone who is a peer would have got the job. So there are many, many options, and I think it's in the air because everyone is thinking the same thing. So the first thing to do is to acknowledge the fact that it's natural, that it's most probably I assume neuronal something like it has to do with neuroscience and that it's something that everyone experiments, and I've seen it at the highest level of leadership. People believe it's only for mean managers. It applies to anyone and it's very democratized as a syndrome. To anyone and it's very democratized as a syndrome.

Speaker 2: 21:23

The second thing that we heard with Vanessa T on the show is the fact that the moment the people started owning it and starting opening about it and started acknowledging the fact that there were some areas they didn't know, it actually helped them a lot because they got a lot of support from their colleagues. They managed to get also some of their friends you know like, for instance, we're a group of friends. We can reach out to each other if we know that one of us is better at something than what we do today. And also the fact that people around them felt more comfortable watching someone brand new asking questions and acknowledging their limitation, rather than the you fake it until you make it, because I think this one is very dangerous. I know that this is a sentence that you can listen to very often, but it can be very, very dangerous, in the sense that nobody is really a fool about the fact that you know you have never done, for instance, like Vanessa T. She was talking about someone who had never been in mainland China before, or someone who had never been in Indonesia before, or someone who has never touched this industry before.

Speaker 2: 22:36

So I think it's also a question of respect, in terms of respecting your colleagues, respecting the community you belong to, around the fact that you know I treat you as an adult. I am an adult and we both know that I have only started my journey there. So I think that there is a balance, and I've seen that happening a couple of times. There is a balance in terms of the acknowledgement, meaning that you need to stay strong when it comes to what you know, and there are many, many things you know because otherwise you would have never been appointed. So there must be some skill sets that are either related to the corporate culture or either related to your technical skills or leadership skills that made you the candidate for that role, and on this one, I think it's important to stay strong in terms of I have confidence.

Speaker 2: 23:30

I have done a couple of assignments already and I'm not perfect, but I know how to lead a team.

Speaker 2: 23:36

Or I know how to manage 1000 people, but I know how to lead a team.

Speaker 2: 23:38

Or I know how to manage 1000 people, but then the part that you don't know, then this part which is not everything, but only this part being open around the fact that you need support, and you will welcome the reverse mentoring. This is something that is very popular these days and it works very well. You would welcome the reverse mentoring of your colleagues and you know, for instance, I've seen it in the digital space and e-commerce positions in tech Leaders are very, very good at getting the youngest team member on the team to spend half a day with them to guide them through the UI, ux, ecosystem or anything. That is something they don't know, or they don't know exactly the lay of the land and being actually welcome into their world. So, yeah, I think for me, three things reminding yourself, it's very natural. Number two, being open and vulnerable. And number three, keeping a good balance between maybe, let's say, a majority of the skills for which you have been appointed that are strong and confident, and a smaller part where you want to learn.

Speaker 1: 24:44

Brilliant. I like this. There's really differentiating between remembering what you already know and holding on to your experience and being very honest about where your gaps are. That's brilliant, thank you. Honest about where your gaps are that's brilliant, thank you. With that in mind, how can people rebuild confidence and credibility when they're moving into a completely new domain or new area.

Speaker 3: 25:10

Yeah, having interviewed so many of our podcast guests, a few themes come through for us. At the end of the day, I think it boils down really to authenticity and taking those small steps. So be upfront with what you want to learn. It's far more than just getting a job done. I think for those individuals who have been able to rebuild confidence and credibility, it was because they had the mindset that they're here to learn something new. It was because they had the mindset that they're here to learn something new. And what might that be? As opposed to I'm here to get the job done. It's what am I doing each day? To learn something new, remembering that you are in the middle of that transition and you're in the middle of learning a new domain.

Speaker 3: 25:53

The second thing that came through for us is to build credibility and trust one day at a time. If you're there to ignite change, remember that it doesn't happen overnight. Especially when you're there to ignite change, keep in mind that you first have to build that credibility and the trust, and so asking yourself what are those moments that you're able to build trust and credibility? What is that next interaction that you're going to have with that individual? What is that next meeting that you might have with the board of directors? What are those moments where credibility and trust can be built before you bring about the changes that you're thinking about? And, last of all, that we notice as a pattern too and Vanessa and I were interviewing our guest is really those who were able to do it well really had a network personal board of directors, as I like to think of it, individuals who they surrounded themselves with, from mentors even what Vanessa said earlier reverse mentoring former bosses, colleagues, peers, industry partners but surrounding yourselves gives you additional energy to go that distance. It gives you that level of encouragement. It also gives you that focus that you need to have, and people around you can really help you collectively to get onto that right path.

Speaker 3: 27:15

I think about some of the things that we've learned doing the Career Transitions podcast, and when we first started, we knew nothing and I remember asking myself you know, what right do I have to play in this space? There's so many other fantastic podcasters those have millions of followers, and why would anybody want to listen to a French and Singaporean duo trying to figure out things as we go along? Right? But I realized that I was in good company because my French sister, vanessa, and I had a way of working through things. So I consider her as part of my personal board of directors Because on days when she was busy, I would write the script. On days when I was traveling, she would step in. And it's this level of trust that you build with the network of people where you encourage each other, you make time for each other and you keep your purpose clear each step of the way. And through that, going back to your question, we rebuilt this confidence, the credibility and, especially as we looked at pivoting into this new space, it just gave us greater confidence when we kept in mind what we are learning each day.

Speaker 1: 28:29

Yes, so powerful as you're sharing that I had a memory of somebody who helped me in a career transition 30 years ago and that power of our board of directors so important of each other and how we connect and support and that connecting to our learning. Yeah, and just a bit of an aside to that, what are some of the mistakes that people make the career transition that we could look out for and try to avoid?

Speaker 2: 28:57

So I think that this is a little bit the reverse side of the coin of what we have discussed so far, and it's the idea of going to fast into action, and I've done it myself. It's very natural and it's actually coming from a good intent. You want to prove yourself and you want to demonstrate your value and you want to also support your colleagues, like, for instance, it happened to me a couple of times. I came after, you know, a vacancy for a couple of months, or someone had been sick, and so you feel the stress of the team, you feel the stress of your colleagues and you want to fill in the gap quickly, because this is what you hear and some people tell you we have been waiting for you for seven months or for eight months. They want to welcome you.

Speaker 2: 29:46

I mean, they are nicely welcoming you and I think that if you jump too fast into action, you might actually lose sight of this period that you need to observe, and you might lose sight of some of the signals, because you need to be able to adapt yourself and to propose a roadmap that is going to have impact. You need to really, really read the context very, very well. So I think that it's something that is a big pitfall and we all do. I remember one of my former leaders and I thought it was a good idea. He had actually, in the onboarding package, created a one pager where their direct report was signing a commitment not to take any critical action for the organization in the next three months.

Speaker 2: 30:37

Wow, yes, and we checked with the lawyer. I remember telling the people who were onboarding that it was a symbolic you know commitment, that it was not legally binding or anything, but it was to remind them by signing the paper that until that particular date and we put a date into the letter, that until that particular date there will be no significant decision made for the organization. And it was three months. It was a little bit literal but actually it worked very well because it really encouraged people to focus on their onboarding.

Speaker 1: 31:09

Excellent, excellent. And we know from what we see that between three and six months is the period and it can feel like a long time, but making that pause up to a minimum of three months is great yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:23

I think the concept that can help the people who listen to us is the concept of return on investment, and it has been demonstrated and not biased by a lot of researchers that there is a return on investment on this three to six months and that there have been a lot of tests like the people who have not invested in that period, actually they have not been as impactful as the ones who actually took the time. I know some of the people I onboard. The concept of ROI is something that talks to them a lot, so I want to share that with the people who listen to us today as well.

Speaker 1: 31:57

That's so important that, with the people who listen to us today as well, that's so important. Based on the conversations you've had and your experience with HR directors, then what Probably very similar, but what advice would you give leaders transitioning into a new role or a new organization?

Speaker 3: 32:13

Yeah, I think the best transitions that I've seen and experienced to a certain extent, those myself too are the ones when the leaders don't rush in to try to fix something. I think in many leaders' minds, when I'm appointed to a role, I'm expected to do something, but oftentimes it is the reverse that helps you to be successful. Like what Vanessa said, it's about focusing on what the ROI will be and investing upfront in a few things. So first, I would say, really focus on cultural fit, whether you are making a transition into a brand new organization or a brand new team. Within an organization there is the culture, both at a macro level, so at a macro organization level, but there are also team cultures. So keep that in mind. Take the time to really understand the unspoken rules, the way things are done on the team, the language that people are using. You may have the best strategy and the best way of doing things as you perceive it, but if you misread the culture of the team or of the organization, whatever you had in mind will not land well. So that's first.

Speaker 3: 33:26

Second, and this also links in with one of the wonderful podcast episodes that we did with Michael Watkins is really sharing that onboarding plan and that learning plan transparently.

Speaker 3: 33:38

And Michael Watkins talks about the first 90 days and really in that first 90 days, really demonstrating what you want to achieve out of those 90 days and communicating that transparently with the people around you, whether it's your supervisor, your line manager or whether it's your peers or the people around you.

Speaker 3: 33:59

But that transparency builds credibility and trust faster than pretending to know that you have all the answers, because oftentimes the answers will come from the people that you surround yourself with, particularly in that first 90 days. The third thing that I picked up was about having that energy and bringing some fun into the process, and it's often underrated. But one thing we have to remember is that transitions are contagious, as is energy. Right People will mirror the energy that you show up with. If you come into your onboarding time feeling really frustrated about things, feeling really upset about something, your team feels that energy. But if you enter into this process with a learning mindset, with curiosity, with lightness and oftentimes a sense of humor, I think your team will feel it and they'll be more comfortable leaning into the change and supporting you through it.

Speaker 1: 34:58

And you've mentioned that you've had Mark Watkins on the podcast and he, as you say, wrote the amazing book that I always recommend to clients going into a new transition the First 90 days. I'm wondering whether there were any fresh insights that you gleaned from him in that conversation with him.

Speaker 2: 35:17

Well, first and foremost, he was extremely gracious. We were very, very impressed with his own level of humility and his approachability. Actually, it was very easy for us to ask for this recording and he actually walked the talk when it comes to establishing trust, and I felt like very good, because it was one of my favorite books in management and I was so happy to see that he was the person that I had. I heard the voice reading the book and the real voice was very, very similar, you know very calm, very composed and very kind. What is amazing is to see that this model that he established close to 30 years ago is still very, very effective. And one of the things we shared with him and he was very interested in listening to both of us was the relevance of his model in a cross-cultural context, because I think he was very confident. Of course, he had done a lot of research in the North American hemisphere and he knew he was working very well there, but we were sharing with him about, you know, this part of the world and the fact that it was absolutely zero difference. So, just as a reminder, what is so powerful in his model is the fact that he diagnosed different contexts of business. So, for instance, one of the four that everyone is aware of now is the concept of startup. And then that you need to match actually the onboarding of the leader to the context the company is at, which is already a reminder that it's not about you and it's about the organization and it's about the business. And then he is very good at encouraging people to have proactive conversation with stakeholders and he's very specific there are six conversations and he's very, very specific about the conversation and the way and the content of this conversation. And it's very interesting that it happened to me a couple of times in difficulties in onboardings where I realized that the person had done the conversation but there was a piece within the conversation that was shared by Michael Watkins that had not been discussed.

Speaker 2: 37:29

And then he's talking about something which is very important as a third point, which is securing early wins, which he's very intentional about. I mean, he encourages us to be very intentional about and he encourages us also to communicate about, which, you know, sometimes people say, oh, you know PR, I don't want to do PR, I don't want to PR myself, which you know. Sometimes people say, oh, you know PR, I don't want to do PR. I don't want to PR myself, but if you are actually establishing a new initiative, that is required because of the context of the business and that you believe has a very important early win, what is the issue about? Asking for the support about it and also, once it's done to share, about the success and the celebration about it?

Speaker 2: 38:15

I think there is nothing wrong about it. It's collective success. It's not about you know you. Once again, it's about the team. So I think in his advice, he was very good at reminding us about this and we had so much fun sharing with him the fact that in China, in Singapore, in Indonesia, in India, the first 90 days was definitely effective. So, yeah, he could actually continue promoting this book everywhere in the world.

Speaker 1: 38:43

Fantastic, fantastic. I think this thing about we have to promote ourselves is also a really key part of the transition, isn't it? Because people need to know who we are. We need to build those relationships quickly, so I think that's amazingly connected. So we're coming towards the end of our conversation. I wonder what's one question that you think people should ask themselves before they make a big career change?

Speaker 3: 39:11

Well, one question I would ask is what do you want to learn about yourself through this change? Every transition will stretch you, but if you're clear about the kind of growth and what sort of growth you're looking for, I think you'll approach the journey with a lot more of a growth mindset and resilience.

Speaker 1: 39:33

And if you could only give one piece of advice to someone at the edge of that career transition, what would it be?

Speaker 2: 39:41

I think we go back to the starting point of our conversation, and it will be about posing, listening, asking questions and also stay anchored in your purpose, in what you believe in. So I think this is a good way for us to have a full circle. We started with this concept of suspending judgment, which is something that Jean is very you're very good at and you're very good at reminding us about, because I need to apply it myself. I would remind myself Vanessa, please suspend your judgment over and over again.

Speaker 1: 40:18

Oh, wow, thank you so much for joining me. It's curious. The piece that I'm taking away from this conversation is all connected to our humanity. It's so much about how we're relating. We've heard again and again things about listening, trust, curiosity, patience, empathy, and also about having clear expectations and being transparent, and I love this idea about also thinking about what can I learn about myself through this journey. This is also a personal growth journey, this transition, and so I thank you so much for your time. We're recording this on a Saturday morning, so it's a passion moment for all of us some of our personal time, and I'm very grateful for you sharing your personal time with all of us so that we can learn how to transition well in these moments in our careers. Thank you.

Speaker 3: 41:15

Thank you. Thank you, jean. You've been an incredible inspiration to us, so thank you for your time too.

Speaker 2: 41:22

My pleasure, see you soon. See you soon.

Speaker 1: 41:37

Thanks for listening to the fulfilled leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend, and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbelfordcom, or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.