The Role of the Career Coach in Discovering Our Callings: A Conversation with Leadership Inklings' Joe Miller

Higher Callings Podcast

Interview of Joe Miller

Recorded July 14, 2022

Host: Donald R. Frederico

Don: What does it take to find our calling? Some people know their callings at an early age, some discover their callings as they progress through school and career, and others may find their true callings much later in life. Whether in search of a job that fulfills us or an opportunity to advance in the job we have, many of us need help to find our callings. That help often takes the form of a career coach who can listen, observe, and help shine a light on our own unique path.

My longtime friend, Joe Miller, is a leadership and career coach who does exactly that. In this episode of Higher Callings, I talk with Joe about the role of career coach. What they do, how they do it, and how they can help people who feel stuck in their current jobs yet are afraid to make a change.

Joe: Generally speaking, I think there is this sweet spot between a person's natural gifts they've been given from high above, their skills, and maybe their passion. So a Venn diagram. Sometimes people add to that Venn diagram the financial aspect. I don't. I think money follows when you're in the right spot. You get adequate resourcing if you're in the right spot. But a real driver for me is identifying what a person's unique gifts are. Why are you here? And often what I find out when I go through this process, and this has been verified a lot in my experience, is an individual is just not feeling fulfilled or happy or whatever words you want to use if they're in a place that's other than that.

Don: I'm Don Frederico and this is Higher Callings.

Hi, I'm with Joe Miller, who is a friend of mine from way back when. Joe is a career coach but has a long career that preceded that. And we've been in and out of touch for many years, but in touch more than out of touch in recent times.

Joe, welcome to Higher Callings.

Joe: Really great to be with you, Don.

Don: I'm really looking forward to this interview. First of all, you, I think were the first person who interviewed me for a podcast on your own podcast called Titans of Transition.

Joe: That's right. I think that was right. Yeah.

Don: And I think I was your 10th interview.

Joe: That sounds about right as well.

Don: And you've done a lot. You've interviewed a lot of people and it's a terrific podcast. And we're gonna talk about that later.

But I first met you when we grew up in Webster, New York, outside of Rochester, and did a lot of things together in high school and then went our separate ways a little bit when we went to college, but kept reconnecting. Do you want to talk at all about your background growing up and how it's influenced the work you're doing now as a career coach?

Joe: Yeah, sure. First of all, I didn't arrive in Webster until I was going into seventh grade. My family, my dad moved around a lot. He was an electrical engineer in defense and aerospace, in the test subcategory of being an electrical engineer. So he would build up test organizations and got bored after four or five years. And then we would go somewhere else. We moved around multiple states. So I didn't actually arrive in Webster until going into seventh, and I felt like an outsider to be honest. And by the way, Webster's a suburb of Rochester, New York. So I arrived feeling like an outsider.

We had moved up from Florida, from the Orlando area. And, it took me a while to get to know people. And the junior high, which was seventh and eighth grade, was in the Village of Webster. So I lived in the Village of Webster first and then later on moved closer to the high school. And it was in high school that I think we got to know one another, and shared a love for music, playing guitars, went to Young Life together I think some, and were in the musicals together a little bit. But it, it was a difficult time connecting, at least in the early years, for me. And it wasn't until I got into Young Life and started getting into some sports and other things that I got to know you.

Don: Yeah. I think a lot of your values probably had been formed by the time we met, and certainly by the time we graduated high school. Tell me a little bit about what your values were growing up, and again, how that influenced you today with the coaching you're doing for your clients.

Joe: That's interesting. That's a great question.

Actually, my father, being in engineering was very much into technology and new developments. And I think it goes back to his child rearing too. His father was a mechanical engineer. But we used to have a lot of discussions at the dinner table. You may not even know this. I may not have shared this with you.

Don: I don't. No, I don't.

Joe: But we would often kind of banter back and forth on different things at the dinner table. Not necessarily light conversations. So I think he was very purposeful in trying to get us to expand our thinking, even back in those days.

So I would say a key element, and I'll just plant this seed we'll talk about later, was developing in us a deep sense of curiosity. And that's an important thing when you look at career and kind of who I am as an individual and how I engage with others as well. So I think that might be one aspect there.

Don: It really is important. I think we even talked about that on your podcast interview of me a while ago. That's interesting. And I'm glad we'll come back to it.

So you went off to college in southern Kentucky, I believe.

Joe: Southeastern Kentucky.

Don: I went to college in Ohio, and I reminded you I think at one point that I had actually visited you and our friend, Dave Burt . . .

Joe: I forgot that. Yeah.

Don: . . . when you guys were in college. I was on a quarter system, so I had several weeks off and I think I got my guitar and a suitcase and put it in the trunk of your car or Dave's car and came down with you and spent probably a week or so with you, which was quite an experience, because it's really a different part of the country than what I was used to.

Joe: Oh, my goodness, yeah.

Don: What was that like for you? Why did you decide to go to college there and what did you study?

Joe: So I mentioned earlier that I was in Young Life, which is a Christian organization, an outreach organization to the youth in high schools.

Don: I think that's really where you and I became good friends. Primarily through Young Life.

Joe: I think so too,

The connection to Young Life really took me down to Cumberland College, because I decided I wanted to look into going into ministry, and being raised Catholic and being a goof off in my catechism classes, I needed some real grounding. So it was through Dave Burt that I actually heard about the college and decided to go down there. It was a great school academically because it had small class sizes.

So what I found out was after about six months, maybe a little longer, I just didn't connect with a lot of the ministry classes and I thought I'm going to take a different direction. I'll go with kind of what I was good at in school and came easy to me. And that was chemistry. So I went from ministry to majoring in chemistry and got a a degree in chemistry, math, physics minors.

Don: You got a science degree in chemistry. And then where did you go from there Joe?

Joe: When I graduated from school, I went into being an analytical chemist. Took a job up in Buffalo, a temporary job, at a company called Westwood Pharmaceutical. They used to make Alpha Keri Lotion. Started doing testing there. An analytical chemist does testing, typically for release of products. It can be a broad range of things, but that's where I focused.

And then went into, we moved to Colorado where Barb and I met and started our family and our life there. I went into working for a pharmaceutical company in Boulder, actually, and spent nine years as analytical chemist. And then I went on to a long track. And I'll just sum up and say that for 35 years I led IT in biotech, biopharma and pharmaceutical companies, at the VP level most of that time.

Don: It was while you were doing that that you started doing some career coaching. How did that happen? That seems like a really big change for you.

Joe: It was. And it was out of need, to be honest with you. I had to engage a coach because I found myself, I changed industries briefly to go into high tech, and it was a very different business than pharma and biopharma. And I ran into some challenges and I needed help. And I had heard about coaching, as I did lot of career support reading on my own.

But I reached out on the internet actually and found my coach, Gary Wood, up north of Toronto and engaged my first coach to help me. And the process was just so helpful. Gary's a great coach, introduced me to what coaching was, and it just helped me so much. And yeah, so that got me interested and planted a seed that maybe I would want to look at that later on myself.

Don: Yeah. So you first were a coaching client, and you started thinking maybe I'd like to be a coach some someday. You're actually the second coach I've had on this podcast. And I think coaching fits really nicely into the theme of Higher Callings, because as we'll get into, much of what you do is help people find their own callings, which may be higher callings or just regular callings.

But I think it would be helpful maybe before we go any further into it to just have you talk a little bit about what coaching is. I should mention, the earlier podcast was with a friend of mine named Steve Seckler, who coaches lawyers. So he's very focused on the legal industry and coaching lawyers in their career transitions. You coach everybody, I think . . .

Joe: Yeah, but mostly it's been leaders or those that are in a management track.

Don: Okay. Great. We'll get to that, but first maybe you could talk a little bit about, what is coaching? I think it's something we've all heard of, but most of us don't really know much about the industry of coaching or the profession of coaching.

Joe: It's not terribly old. I think it's probably only been around for 25 years or something like that. People pretty quickly connect to the word "coach" and think of sports coaching. And there's some similarities there. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But often people get it a little bit, I would call it muddled with mentoring. And let me just draw a contrast to unpack what coaching is to me.

You go to a mentor, it's somewhat informal. Typically you meet with somebody for lunch or you sit down and say, "Hey, I want to grow my career. I want to do more in a particular area." And they offer you specific, I would call it more tactical advice as things to try. And some of the idea of sports coaching kind of falls into that. So I understand where the confusion can get introduced.

But a coach really is not that. You can be coached by someone who has no knowledge of your field at all. I think it's more helpful if they do, but it's not required, because one of the biggest things about a coach is that they are really like thinking partners. Typically you go to a coach because you want to try to get clarity. And it can be, your goal for coaching can be various, it can be career, it can be a lot of different things. It can be communications. And there are niches, coaches that are different types of coaches for each of these kind of categories. Just about everything you could think of. But you don't necessarily have to be an expert in the field to be a coach of someone in that field.

In fact, one of the coaching trainings that I participated in was a group coaching exercise where you were coaching someone how to juggle. And 99% of the people in this exercise don't know how to juggle.

Don: You mean literal juggling, like you see in a circus or something?

Joe: Yes. And the power of understanding what coaching is, is through the observation and trying to pull out of someone keen insights that would be helpful for them in the process of reaching the goal. You may not know that content area or that domain very well, but you observe. So one of the things that, we'll talk about competencies for coaching, but is deep curiosity.

Don: Again, a characteristic that you see in yourself and have always had.

Joe: Yeah. Ties back to that family dinner table conversation. You have to be curious and help people unpack or bring things out, be really observing.

So that's somewhat non-directional, or non-directive. But a difference in coaching too than mentoring is that typically you need to engage someone in essentially a contract. Do you really want to do something? Are you committed? And if you're not committed, there's really no point in going further. So you challenge people to make their own commitments with you as an accountability partner and you hold them to it.

And it seems pretty simplistic, but believe it or not, that's a hard thing for people.

Don: It sounds like a lot of it is listening and observing, as you say, and drawing people out, helping them understand what is driving them, which they may not understand without the help of a coach

Joe: Yes. And once you bring forward those observations you move them forward into commitments, and progression towards some, and you've gone through sort of a clarification process, some end goal. And you're the accountability partner. And it's becoming skilled in the process of moving people forward in a supportive manner and in an environment of discovery.

Don: How do you develop those skills? Where do you go to learn to be a coach?

Joe: It was highly unregulated early on. It's still somewhat that way. There's a number of different training organizations. For me, I got my first coaching training through an online community called "Coachville," which was founded by one of the early pioneers of coaching, Thomas Leonard, and then went through their own certification process. Later on, back in 2015, I became certified through the John Maxwell Team program. But there is international organizations. There's several of those. International Coaching Foundation is one of them. It involves demonstration of coaching skills by seeing someone, observing you. In that way, it's similar to therapy and counseling.

So observation, time, and then there's some skills testing and those sorts of things, and hours in the seat, that kind of thing.

Don: What kinds of people hire you to be a coach? Is it always somebody who's looking for a career change or can it be other situations as well?

Joe: It can be other situations for sure. Careers change, which ties into my podcast a little bit. But also someone who just feels stuck in their career or stuck, or having a life challenge and feeling stuck making progress. There are life coaches, which tend to be more general and probably go more in that category. Mine tend to shift more towards business generally.

But I've coached people who wanted to be comedians.

Don: So they were just getting started?

Joe: No. They had already done standup and they were struggling. They didn't know why they were struggling. And they were wondering, should they do something else? Just lots of different folks. It can be anywhere, to be honest.

In the business context, I've been brought in to do what I call performance coaching. Someone, a manager or leader, will say, "I have a person I need help assessing whether they're going to fit in my organization or not. I want to try to help them." So you engage with them and you try to find out, what are the real challenges underneath that are keeping them from being effective? And you try to move them forward. Sometimes they're just not a good fit. So you help them discover that.

Don: Joe, I think you said you became a coach because you had a coach, who was helpful to you. And I guess you decided you'd like to help other people in the same way. What was your path into coaching? How did you get there?

Joe: Like finding the coach originally, I looked up on the internet and found some options to get trained.

Don: Oh, you did mention that.

Joe: Yeah. But I had a full-time job, and coaching starting out isn't like something you're gonna make a ton of money at. I just did this on the side and I just let people I knew know professionally that I was doing it.

And, to be honest, I maybe coached several, one or two people at a time, maybe an hour a week, because I didn't have a lot of time for more than that. And did that until I retired.

Don: How long have you been coaching, Joe?

Joe: I would say I've been coaching since about 2006, something like that.

Don: So in a few minutes, I want to get to maybe hearing about some of your clients, obviously not to identify anybody, but just generically. Before I do, I wanted to ask you, what's your philosophy about coaching? What do you bring philosophically to your relationships with your clients?

Joe: I think the model that I have and the underlying philosophy is that, generally speaking, people will come to a coach to help to move forward. Lots of times they don't know to what. There is this, I'll call it sense of disquiet or ill at ease or dis-ease, I'm not sure what the right word would be, but something's not quite right. Their life has a lot of friction in it, and they need help sorting it out.

So the first step is try to figure out what's bothering you. And generally speaking, I think there is this sweet spot between a person's natural gifts they've been given from high above, their skills, and maybe their passion. So a Venn diagram. Sometimes people add to that Venn diagram the financial aspect. I don't. I think money follows when you're in the right spot. You get adequate resourcing if you're in the right spot.

But a real driver for me is identifying what a person's unique gifts are. Why are you here? And often what I find out when I go through this process, and this has been verified a lot in my experience is an individual is just not feeling fulfilled or happy or whatever words you want to use if they're in a place that's other than that.

And there are a lot of things that play into that. There's conditioning. They may land in a career that they have been told is the right place for them to go. They may have had some skills. They may be okay at a certain thing that drives them into a career, and you and I have talked about that in the context of the legal profession and other things, where they might be competent, but it's not really what lights them up. And they may be getting financial rewards over time.

Myself, I was getting financial rewards. I was doing well in my career. And I thought it was because I was a technologist and I was a good leader in technology. It turns out I was okay at that, but it was really driving change and the people aspect that I later discovered over time that was really lighting me up. And so those similar kinds of things can happen. So this discovery process is trying to help people understand, discover who they really are. Why are they here? It's the big questions.

Don: That makes a lot of sense to me. You talked about the Venn diagram. You're trying to help people discover the marriage of their natural gifts, the skills they've developed, and their passions. And if they can figure that out, if they can understand themselves better in those three areas, then they'll have a clearer sense, and you mentioned clarity a few times too, they'll have a clearer sense of what career path they should be taking or that might be most fulfilling to them. Is that a good summary?

Joe: Yes, it is. And you said marriage. I would say intersection, to use the mathematical term.

Don: Okay. In the coaching that you do, do you see some common themes in your clients, some common issues that they grapple with? And if so, how do you help them navigate those issues?

Joe: I'd say there's a couple that come right to mind immediately. One is dealing with fear. People have a sense of being stuck because, for various reasons. But typically what you'd find out pretty early on is they'll articulate to you exactly what their next step should be, but they won't take it, because their fear of failure, fear of success sometimes. I know that sounds weird, but if you're successful in something that you're not currently doing, that's change. People don't like change. We are biologically wired to resist change. So that's one thing obvious to most people is fear, but you know, how pervasive that is and the nuance of that, I don't think it's that obvious.

The other thing is understanding what I call conditioning. And this is kind of like the B.F. Skinner kind of conditioning, I guess. Conditioned response. Over time. But it's more messages that have been given to you and your family or your friends or your social group. I would go so far as to say it's beyond bias. It's beyond that kind of conditioning. It's more even into the realm of what I would call paradigms. I'm a big paradigm guy. Shout out to Joel Barker, "The Business of Paradigms."

Don: I'm thinking of Thomas Kuhn.

Joe: That's the source. Thomas Kuhn.

Don: I read that freshman year in college and it stuck with me.

Joe: Yes. And it's, you reject at the subconscious level data that can contradict. So I've talked to people, and they just thought they were, this was their career path. But they didn't get validation in their career by their own feeling of fulfillment and significance and flourishing, but they wouldn't let go of that. Because the data, they would say that wasn't the right spot for them. Just never penetrated.

Don: That's really interesting that people need help so much help with that. I think of my own path, and I won't go into any detail, but just to say that my first major career move I made because I had fear of being stuck where I was and that I needed to get into a different job, basically, or I would allow myself to just be stuck in a job that wasn't fulfilling me at the time.

Do you ever see that in your clients?

Joe: Yes. Fear can operate in both places. It can give you either positive or negative momentum, moving forward. And in one of the coaching frameworks that Thomas Leonard put forth was, "Are you moving? Do you feel like you're moving towards something? Are you moving away from something?"

Don: That's interesting. Yeah. Are you trying to leave your job or are you trying to find the job that really would be meaningful to you? I assume it's a spectrum and it's really something of both, but which one dominates is going to vary.

Joe: It's gonna vary. Yeah.

Don: Yeah. That's interesting. What else? You mentioned fear, but what else do you see? I think you said there was a second thing.

Joe: Well, conditioning.  

Don: Oh, it's the conditioning. Okay.

Joe: Yeah. And I will mention a book by Jon Acuff called "Soundtracks". It's a good one for listeners to check out. It's this idea of the tapes that run in your head. And just being aware of them, bringing them into your consciousness, I think is very helpful for anyone. Yeah, those are really very typical things.

And then, when you get into some sort of typical problems that I get into in sort of the career space, my relationship with my boss and those sorts of things, then you get into other, really more specific things, like are you helping your boss be successful? Are you waiting for your boss to make you successful? Because you're not gonna be successful until you help your boss be successful. There's things like that.

Don: Right. Gems of wisdom from experience.

Joe: Yeah. Things that work, which might move a little bit into mentoring, but they're really still coaching.

Don: How do you know when you've been successful in coaching a client?

Joe: The initial tee-up question you had for me is, what's my framework? Or how do I approach things, my process? And I start with the paradigm of, again, are you operating in your gifts?

And so movement towards, first of all, coming to an understanding and clarity, and then actively moving forward towards that. Are you on a vector? Are you moving towards that or not? To me, I measure that.

Don: So it's not necessarily have they reached the end goal, but are they on a better path and moving in the right direction?

Joe: Right, cause it's, the end goal, actually that's another framework.

Don: What is the end goal?

Joe: “Get off the outcome” is another coaching framework. People focus so much on the outcome that they don't see the journey. And it's a lot like climbing a mountain. You get the false-shoulder effect. You don't have enough visibility forward to ultimately really know what that destination is going to be. You want to go up.

Don: So you've obviously learned a lot about coaching over the years and have developed quite a bit of experience. You attend a lot of conferences and you're networking with other coaches. Tell me a little bit about that.

Joe: I'm part of the John Maxwell Team community. There's thousands of coaches in that. It's a professional community and a development community, and they continue to offer training. And so that's part of where I make connections with other coaches. And then there's other people I've met along the way that I work with and collaborate with on different coaching contracts and things of the nature.

Don: Sounds like a really interesting profession. And you get to meet a lot of people and help a lot of people, I assume. People who are feeling stuck, what should they be doing? How should they find a coach? When would they know that it's time to look for a coach? What advice would you give those people?

Joe: I think, maybe too much of a stigma. It's kind of like there's too much of a stigma about getting counseling or therapy, if you think you might need it.

Don: And you have to be careful to make sure they don't think you're a licensed therapist.

Joe: Yeah. I am not. And that's a big thing you learn as a coach is when to say, not for me. You need that. Absolutely.

Don: I was wondering about that.

Joe: Yes. Absolutely. I think that it's recognizing that you need it is akin to realizing you want help and you need help. And so it's kind of as simple as that. If someone feels a disquiet or dis-ease about moving forward in any aspect, career or life, then coaching is something to really consider.

Don: How long is a coaching relationship? Is it a matter of a few sessions for a couple of months? Or can it go on for a year? Or more?

Joe: Coaching is not like therapy in the sense that you would go on for years. I think that you're probably looking at at least two or three months, maybe meeting at least every other week. Going much longer than that, this is my perspective, going much longer out than that, and I think it gets really difficult to maintain continuity and hold that accountability relationship. Anywhere between, three months and a year probably. And they're engagement-based, based upon goals that get set up.

Don: Oh, okay. At the very outset.

Joe: Yes. That's part of the intake process.

Don: And can you share with us any outcomes or any particular success stories?

Joe: One comes to mind. I had a woman that I was working with who got a new boss, and she was at the, I would say, manager level. And her new boss, the V.P., she wasn't connecting with her.

And when I first met with this woman, she was expressing how she didn't feel like she had any influence with her boss. She wasn't listening to her. She was relegating her to things that she felt were beneath her. And this was a similar conversation, tying back to what we said before about working with your boss.

I said "Why would she trust that you knew how to do things? Has she seen you do them?" And it's funny. People just naturally assume, "I'm here. They must know how wonderful I am." And she was very competent, but this new boss didn't know that. And I got back to a, some people may have heard of, Steven Covey model about the emotional bank account.

I said, "You need to make deposits in your bank account with your new boss. You need to demonstrate and give her evidence that she can trust you and she can rely on you." And so we went through a process where we identified what some of those things would be. And she marched down the process of doing that and started making offers to her boss.

"I can take this off your plate." Remember I said before, help your boss be successful. It wasn't necessarily something this individual wanted to do, but knew her boss needed help. And slowly she, over time, making these successful deposits with her boss, her boss said, "I can rely on you." And probably within, I don't know, less than a year, I think it's probably eight or nine months, she got promoted. So that's an example.

Don: Yeah. And that's a great example. And trust is just so important in one's career.

Joe: Huge.

Don: But you're talking about, at least in part developing trust in you as a competent individual, but also trusting you as somebody who will be loyal, to a degree, and that's such a key element of success in any career.

Joe: Back to Covey, it's competence, it's character and competence. It's not just competence.

Don: I like that. Yeah. You've got a lot of good frameworks and a lot of good models.

For all those years that you were in IT and really a leader in IT in your various organizations you worked for, did you have any experience that you drew upon when you later decided to become a coach?

Joe: Well, I'd say I connected some things I was doing that at the time, I didn't. . . You know, we talked about making the connection in terms of your gifting, or we will maybe talk about that a little bit. What I found was you could be real tactical as a manager. Especially in IT, you're getting pounded all the time by the business. Make sure your services are running and you can kind of get this view that only goes out a week or two. "Have you done this yet? Have you solved that problem?" And then you start treating your people more like any other resource and not like real flesh and blood people.

Don: They're assets.

Joe: They're assets. That's the word I was looking for, Don. And I found myself shifting into really caring for my people and wanting to make sure they were successful.

And we started having conversations about what they wanted to do over a longer period of time. These are more developmental conversations. So I went from having one-on-ones that were very, one-on-one meetings that were very tactical, to meetings that were more developmental. Now that's a challenge. So what I didn't really understand at the time was, I was kind of coaching. I wasn't trained, but I was sort of naturally doing some of those things.

Don: So we talked about gifts, skills, passion, and you were presumably employing a gift that you still employ as a coach today, and it was helpful to you as a coach today.

Joe: Yeah. And I'll use a musical analogy that I know you'll connect with, and that's resonance. So you could have dissonance, two notes don't go well together, but you have this resonance that will occur, that you actually get an additive effect when you're in sync. I'm not explaining this very well, but you will, something really feels good when you're in the right spot and it's reinforcing you doing it again. And so I don't think I was even conscious of it, but I started seeing better performance in my people because I was investing in them beyond them being an asset.

Don: And you cared about them.

Joe: And I cared about them. And because of that, I've maintained relationships with people that have gone back decades because of that.

Don: Great. Going back to your background and your career, you went to college thinking you might want to go into the ministry, and there's a sort of pastoral sense to coaching, isn't there?

Joe: There can be, I think, yes.

Don: Not that there has to be a religious component to it, but pastors in churches, or in other religions besides Christianity as well, the leader of the religious institution, part of that job is helping people find fulfillment in their lives and doing that in a counseling relationship. And you're doing that as a coach. There's some parallels there.

Joe: That's true.

Don: Let's talk about your podcast, Titans of Transition. I think I have a sense that your podcast is an adjunct to your coaching business, if you want to call it that. Tell us a little bit about Titans of Transition. Why you started it. What's the idea behind it?

Joe: Yeah. So I, about a few months before I retired, I'd been listening to a lot of podcasts, and I thought, I think I might like to try that. Remember, Joe doesn't have a whole lot of problem with taking some risks. That's my temperament. So I started thinking about it and I thought, I'd like to be able to be an influencer. I'd like to be able to influence people. And then, looking back at the engagements and coaching I had, and actually just, whether you know it or not, sometimes as a manager, you're coaching your team. And so the conversations I'd had with my team members, and I thought, people get to these places where they get sort of stuck or they need clarity and they need to make shifts and changes.

And that's where the idea of transitions came into my mind. Not so much transformation. That's a longer thing. But identifying when it's time to make a shift or a change. And then that sort of birthed the idea of the podcast. And as I thought about it, I thought, this certainly was in my thinking of starting this, I'd like to interview people who have successfully made transitions and unpack, "How did you know you needed to make a transition? Was there like an aha moment? Was it a slow gradual thing?" And then, the advice-to-your-younger-self question always is built into my agenda as well for the sessions I do.

And then I also thought, along the lines of Tim Ferris, where I stole the "Titans" title from, "Tools for Titans," interviewed over a period of time all these leaders and then thematically pulled their advice together into sort of chapter headings that may lead into a book one day. And I am seeing themes over the first couple years that I have done the podcast.

Don: What are some of those themes?

Joe: Fear has come out, fear of making a change.

Don: Fear of being on a podcast, maybe.

Joe: That's a good one. Let's see, what are some of the other, I'm going a little bit blank at the moment.

Don: But these are people who have overcome the fears. And made those transitions that have made a huge impact on their lives.

Joe: Right.

Don: So some of these are career changes, but are you also finding people who later in their lives, in what some people, some of the books I've read, have talked about "the second half of life," have decided, "Okay, I'm done with my career, but now I want to transition to something that's not going to make a lot of money for me, but it is going to give my life more meaning. It's something that I'm passionate about and I want to do later in life?"

Joe: Yes.

Don: Tell me about some of those transitions.

Joe: Here's a really good example, the first person I interviewed, Bob Tipton, a very successful guy. And he tells the story, actually, it's one of my highlight episodes, about the "I love me" wall, where he is building, he's setting up his home office. He's left corporate America and going into consulting. And his wife does art and she has her art studio. And he's setting up his office. And he goes up to talk to his wife, and he says, "Come on down. Take a look at my office. I want to see what you think." And as he's looking at her wall, he's seeing pictures of the family and significant family things. And he's remembering, he just put all these career awards and accolades . . .

Don: Trophies . . .

Joe: . . . trophies up in his office. He says, "Hang on a minute, let me go downstairs and make some changes." And he made a very deliberate shift to look at things that I would think are more long lasting and eternal, if you will. And it's that second half kind of conversation that I think a lot of people get in their mid-career, they're already thinking about that sort of thing. So, that's just one example.

Don: I thought that was a great story and I watched, I guess, on YouTube, that podcast and I really loved that story. Any other examples like that? People moving into new areas where they're trying to find fulfillment rather than make a living?

Joe: I had the one woman that my son knew who was a V.P. of Design at Yahoo and Facebook, and she has become a coach. I also, one of our classmates, Eugenia, went from being in a corporate type of job too, and on the side, she developed a real love for Pilates. Now this one's striking because she ends up quitting her job. No, she ends up, I think she ends up selling her house before she landed a Pilates job in Saint Martin. And just a few days before she flies there, I think, she finds out she has a job there, but not before.

Don: Yeah. It was a great story.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I did want to mention something else, because some of my other tribe may be tuning into this. I'm going to certainly tell them about it.

I actually manage two professional communities, as well. A community of about 40 plus, might be 41 or 42 now, vice presidents of IT in biotech pharma. I manage that online community and we have meetings regularly. And also just launched another community for the next level down, the director level group. And there's about 20 people in there too. And it's a support community, but as you were talking, I thought of mentioning this because really there's some, we have conversations on the side, which is mentoring, coaching, as well. It's been good to keep investing in those folks as well.

Don: Great.

If anybody wants to learn more about coaching, either to become a coach or because they need a coach, how can they reach you?

Joe: I would say the best thing to do is you can reach me at LeadershipInklings.com, and Don can give you this in the notes.

Don: Yes, I'll put it in the show notes.

Joe: That's my overall organization. And I have links out to the podcast and I have links and navigation out to contacting me for coaching.

Don: Joe, thanks very much. This has been very informative and entertaining, and I wish you and your coaching clients continued success in your various careers.

Joe: Thanks, Don. I'm glad you invited me on to Higher Callings. I've enjoyed listening to your episodes as well, and I love the name and what it implies.

Don: Thank you. All right, Joe, you take care.

Joe: All right. Bye-bye, Don.