Have you ever thought, “I can’t do this for another 10-20 years,” but you have no idea what comes next?Or maybe you’ve been laid off after a long career and you’re quietly wondering, “Am I too old to start over?”In this episode, Todd and Chris sit down with Brian Trembley, an engineer who spent nearly 30 years designing high-stakes medical devices for brain and spinal surgery. After more than 20 years with the same company, a wave of layoffs forced him out of a role that had once felt like a calling-and dropped him into a full-blown midlife reinvention.
Brian shares how he moved from:
- Feeling burned out, misaligned, and as if the “dream machine” inside him had died
- Getting laid off and refusing to “play it safe” by taking another misaligned job
- To “betting on Brian” and launching his own consulting business and other creative projects
You’ll hear:
- The subtle signs your career is out of alignment (before the burnout and layoffs hit)
- How to tell the difference between ‘productive discomfort’ and pure fear
- Why community, coaching, and asking for help can fast-track reinvention
- How to use your experience and network to create a portfolio career in midlife
- What it really looks like to surrender control and still move forward
If you’re a midlife professional wondering what’s next-and whether it’s too late to change-Brian’s story is proof that you can redesign your life and career around who you are now, not who you used to be.
Episode Transcript
Brian: I’m going to where the energy feels alive, where it’s an expansive feeling to move in that direction versus a contractive feeling All right. All right. Super excited to be here for this episode. And Chris, we got a client of ours and a friend of mine also, Brian Tremblay on the line because we wanted to do an episode.
Todd: Talking about the reinvention process from somebody who has gone through it, is going through it and actually is at a point right now where reinventing his career is very much on the table and it’s very, very exciting. But Brian, you really represent somebody that took this on. We’ll get into your story a little bit of somebody that had a longstanding career, uh, and then went through the process of getting let go and is now sitting on the precipice of a new career and working with us.
You really went through this process. So first off, just really grateful that you’ve taken the time to be here with us to share your story ’cause I think it really will help other people that are in this process. And I just wanna say thanks for being here, brother.
Brian: Oh, you’re welcome. it’s my pleasure. This is my first for a podcast, so it just tells you how far afield I’m going f rom some prior ways.
Todd: Yeah, I mean, we’re all reinventing, right? So this is new for all of us. This is Chris and I first doing the podcast together, and I think it’ll be helpful to start off with your background and your story, because you did have a 20 year pretty solid corporate career that, like we said, has now shifted, but why don’t we start there.
Tell us a little bit about what you were doing and then what happened before we get into the process of transitioning.
Brian: Yeah, so I was in medical device design for, well, really almost 40 years. And then in my last role I was with my prior employer for, for 21 years, and it was really, really interesting work. It was in cranial and spinal neurosurgery designing. equipment and devices that allow a surgeon to very, very precisely navigate into someone’s brain or someone’s spine for an implant into their sinuses for an ENT procedure. And it was just continually interesting. Always new, always fresh. And as I progressed in my career, I got more and more responsibilities and then started collaborating with domestic, design partners and then international design partners and cranial robotics. And it was just fascinating and super challenging.
super low tolerance for errors. You know, if something I worked on failed failed it could be disaster for a patient or worse. And so it was a lot of pressure, a lot of responsibility to carry but I seem to thrive pretty well in that environment. Always very curious about learning new things and that curiosity served me well in the role, I liked partnering with people in teams and in collaboration.
So it had a lot of great things. And as far as where my life energy was being directed, it really had a very worthwhile purpose, shall we say, right? I mean, we’re spending our energies on something in some kind of endeavor, and this was very clearly helping people. And you know, it had some real fun spots along the way.
When, um, the movie Dr. Strange came out, our company rented a local movie theater and a bunch of people on that team, probably a couple hundred all sat in the theater. And we were watching the movie, and in the opening scene, there was actually many things that I worked on and some of them just prior to public release showing up in that opening scene where Dr. Strange is in the surgical suite. So, you know, it had a lot of, fun there and a lot of family, I see saw people get married and raised children and kids off to college. So it really, really had a lot of meaning for me.
Chris: Brian, was that something that you, were you like seeking that out? Was that something that was on your radar or how’d you end up in that field, in that industry specifically?
Brian: Well, when I was in that. Decision point as a, as a younger person, I was weighing engineering, which would’ve been very much along the lines of my family. My father in particular, or a rock drummer. I played drums, uh, pretty well. And at that time I probably could have made a go at it, but I took the easy route and went into engineering,
Chris: I took the easy route and went into the complex brain surgical engineering device area.
Brian: I didn’t start there. I started actually with, Westinghouse and soon found myself working on things like, the F 22 radar on the Raptor, started in the late eighties, and also a small manned submarine for Navy Seals that would dock on the back of a nuclear sub.
And get delivered into a hotspot and then seals would go off in the quiet of this battery powered sub and do whatever they do. but I started to feel a misalignment in that role and in that environment and my aspirations. And so my next job, I found myself in infant care working on, incubators and warmers for premature babies.
it was really a very intentional karmic realignment, shall we say. I just wanted to be putting my heart and my energy toward a different kind of outcome. you know, I don’t mean that as a criticism in any way of defense work. I mean, regrettably, this kind of stuff is still needed at this time in history. But I, I was ready for a change and one thing led to another.
Time to move out Colorado and expand my vistas again, get some fresh air in the west, and this particular job was just calling me and wouldn’t let go even though it took like five interviews and two trips out here to land. It
Todd: sounds like you had a really, successful, enjoyable career, right? You found something that to you had meaning, you were learning new things you were giving back. You know, I’m guessing money was pretty good, that you could afford a lifestyle at least that was pretty good for you.
So it feels like a good career, but then, Something happened along the way. The industry changed. You were eventually what? Either let go or you left. Talk us through what the end was like that forced you thinking about this notion of reinvention.
Brian: Well, there were kind of two endings. There was the formal ending when I was invited to retire, along with many, many other people. As it turns out in our annual fiscal cycle, you know, many mouths to feed, not enough food to feed ’em all. And so this had become kind of an annual thing.
It still kind of caught me by surprise very much actually. But the ending started to come sooner for me in that I was now 20 years into my career with substantially more skills than when I started. And many, many. Accomplishments I was very proud of under my belt. Yet it would still take, at this point, three to five times longer to accomplish the same amount of work for a product release with a larger team.
So I was starting to feel this real profound misalignment, it feels like I’m pushing a rope all day long. Like I’ve got skills, I got abilities, and all this energy is being expended on non-value added things, particularly for someone in my stage of my career and abilities. So when it finally landed last May, it was still really shocking to me because I had, you know, so many close relationships and it was almost like being disowned from your family, but not being told why. on the one hand I knew like, Hey, this is just business. This is what they do, but it’s, it was quite another thing to kind of be battery in the matrix and then suddenly shot out, know, if you remember that part of the movie, it, you know, it was rather shocking for Neo, so it was shocking for me.
Yeah, it’s been quite a journey.
Chris: can I jump back for a minute? Because that’s really interesting that feeling, you were saying you started to feel like, you’re pushing a rope, right. Started to feel like you’re doing non-value activities. Are you saying that from the perspective of you maybe falling out of love with it or are you saying that from the perspective of as you got to be maybe more senior or more sort of like in the administrative world versus the problem solver engineering world what was the dynamic that contributed to that feeling?
Brian: , there were really probably three things. Just how they all tease apart is a little hard for me to say, but. The ability for me to feel like I was really maximizing my contributions and my gifts was slowly diminishing as the bureaucratic overhead of that environment started to steadily increase.
And I was very fortunate because I had a role where I had leadership responsibilities, but like on the technical side, not people management, but mentoring skill transfer, kinda late stage career, things that prepare the next generation to thrive in the environment. And I was actually super excited about that piece.
But the longer arc of this had been something that, I had not really been as keenly aware of until really in the past year and in particular the past, say, six months, and that is, patterns of self betrayal. Twisting myself into pretzels to make myself fit in an environment that really wasn’t conducive or no longer really flowing with my life’s calling and not having a clear sense of life’s calling that even further compounded the issue.
So there’s many things.
Todd: So you had some self-awareness that for you personally, your relationship with your work was not matching or aligning with who you were. just as a human, which feels like that wasn’t the case previously. is the term burned out apply here? Talk us to us a little bit about this moment in time because especially for people that are reinventing, really important for us to become more self-aware where we’re at in the process.
Chris and I talk a lot about that, like, where are you in this process right now? And this is a juicy moment for you. because that’s when I met you after, when you started to do more self-exploration work and understanding, tell us a little bit more about that moment and then even with that, it sounds like the company let you go and there was disappointment even though it wasn’t aligning.
So it feels a little bit, not linear on that point.
Brian: yeah. Very much so. I mean, there was definitely burnout. That was a, a very slow burn. You know, the classic frog in the pot of water kind of thing. And concurrently with this, there were multiple big life events, big waves crashing on my shores. I had lost my brother metaphorically, not completely. I had two super big challenges with my house, it required massive outlays of cash, unexpected and unplanned. And then, a relationship failure about 15 months ago. That was in part because of this self betrayal and this gradual draining of my energy. And so the burnout piece was all happening all at the same time.
The physical effects, that was probably the fourth wave. I’m starting to get now concerned for my physical wellbeing. And that became a big focus and concern naturally. And then the fifth one, you know, the coup de grâce was, the sayonara day at my employers. So yeah, it’s been big.
Chris: It’s a heavy experience, I’m sure a set of heavy experiences, but just in the retelling it’s an amazing, sequence of events all happening in such a small period of time, did you feel as you were living through that were you experiencing that? , It’s all happening at once feeling?
Brian: Well, you know, I, I did, and, and my relationship to those experiences has dramatically shifted. Meaning I look at it now and I see what an enormous gift it has all been,
except for my brother. Enormous gift to be, you know, as I used to say, like brought to your knees in a way. And I don’t mean it like in a religious sense, but just humbled to the point where it’s like, alright.
You know, the next big boulder roll down the hill might just be the one that flattens you entirely. I just started to say, Hey, you know, this feels awful. And it was sustained for a long time and I just kept on turning to it. For me, I had the opportunity to reapply internally and I spent maybe an hour on the website for a company with 90,000 plus employees. I mean, there were all kinds of jobs I could have applied for, and I just kept saying, no, no, this is a cop out.
I’m gonna bet on Brian. I don’t know where this is going. I feel awful. This is the lowest I’ve been in my life. I’m not gonna flinch and it was hard.
Todd: And this is when I met you one of the things that you did that I think was so wise, and this is really important for anyone that’s resonating with any part of Brian’s story or in some form of reinvention or transition in their career, is that you were very good. I’m giving you a reflection on yourself of reaching out for help.
You did not stay isolated fully. So I know the outplacement services were good, but then you also joined my community and you got coaching from me and others, by the way, you were really very open to turning towards, hey, I’m in shambles right now. This isn’t easy, and you showed up for yourself.
This whole I bet on Brian seemed like an internal drive that you had where you wanted to uncover something about yourself. That’s why we’re doing this episode, right? The betting on yourself right now, reinvention is challenging, but it’s also an opportunity.
And we could talk about that in a fun way ’cause you’re through a lot of the hard work. But talk about those moments, right? Like when you first met me, for example, and our original community calls and we were going through this whole idea of, well let’s get clarity. And Todd’s all excited, right?
Oh, you have an opportunity and like you weren’t all about it, were you? In the beginning, you had some nice battles along the way, you know, which I think were healthy discomfort. But talk about that part because you turned to get help. You were also resisting some of the advice in a good way because you weren’t fully ready to take it in.
But now you’re through a lot of that. So talk us through that part of your process. ’cause I think it’s really interesting.
Brian: you know, it, it’s really interesting how I even, landed in your community in the first place. I wasn’t actively looking for this and I had been getting emails from you by way of something. I attended like two or three years prior, one event, and I was still on your mailing list. And for whatever reason, I opened up purpose accelerators. And the rest, is history as we’re here. But I just decided to not go it alone, which is very much my MO. And I see that with a lot of people, men in particular. I wasn’t in a place where I was in touch enough with my dreams. It felt like the dream machine in me had died and that was a terrifying feeling, And so a lot of the conflict that we had, was around like, you’re asking for something in me that has like gone dormant and fallow and it was really unpleasant to have that brought to my face. It’s like I can’t even answer a simple question or a simple call. That was also fuel for the fire.
At some level, it was just like, all right, this is a rough reflection and I just can’t keep kicking this can down the road, I won’t.
Chris: That is a profound statement. “I felt like the dream machine in me had died.” I wrote that right down as you said it, because I think first of all, that’s a profound experience. Amazing way of putting it, but I know exactly what you mean, and I think that there’s a lot of people who know exactly what you mean, but maybe couldn’t have put those words to it. and I can imagine how annoying it might be to have someone challenging you in bringing that to the forefront. And that is great that you had the wherewithal to reach out and find some, you know, almost against your own will find some help to face that challenge directly on.
Brian: Well, the community part I really enjoyed because that was a continuity of the part that I really still enjoyed working, you know, being in collaboration with people, riffing off, people, sharing, supporting each other. I mean, that was super generative for me and that carried me through, you know, the occasional.
Dust up with Todd,
Todd: Oh,
Brian: is very productive.
Todd: That’s what you always said to me. Even as we were going through it, you said, I’m not, uncomfortable with the discomfort. There was a part of you that knew that what you were doing was healthy, and again, I’m speaking from the perspective of someone that was helping guide you through your process right now.
The whole point of this why Chris and I are doing this is that reinventing yourself, reinventing your career, particularly for people that are in the middle of their lives, that have a trajectory that’s somewhat deeply rooted in habits, behaviors, thinking, is challenging. Okay? Like it’s not all roses.
And so sometimes we get on the call I’ll push you to get clarity, like what do you really want? Dream again, dream again. It is a big thing that I do particularly we do this whole eulogy practice of like just think idealistically about your life. Really challenging for a lot of people, including yourself.
But I’m curious now that you’re kind of close to the other side, ’cause I do wanna get to what has emerged for you, did some of that start to click in? Meaning with your constant exploration of your own personal discomfort around some of these questions that felt kind of basic now, but when did you start to feel, there is light at the end of this tunnel?
Because I don’t even know that we’ve never talked about this, but when did you start to feel a little bit more, oh, there are things that I can do and I’m starting to feel more energy and more motivation because there is a pendulum here in reinvention and you’ve gone through it, but now I’m curious about when did it start to swing the other way?
Brian: Well, it’s been an interesting 15 months because when I joined your community, I started to feel hopeful on many things. I had like a voracious appetite to learn things and. these parts of my life that I’d been stumbling on and, disserving beliefs and the whole pile of it. But like the eulogy exercise was really powerful. I didn’t have a grandiose vision of just what it was gonna look like, but I saw the value in it. So that hooked me. And then as my return to work started looming, I could feel my energy starting to tank again. And some of my irritability that like six months later, after taking time off, I still didn’t have a clear purpose locked in.
And then I was there for about, seven or eight weeks and I was kind of in this liminal space where, all right, I think I can learn some things or some particular skills that you know I can learn and take this time. out I went again and then boom back down. But it really started to turn in early summer, through just, again, kind of keeping after it, not just with Will, but like really tuning in and allowing space to open up for me, that is like so huge because I was, you know, just living from the head up over indexing, in the intellect and there’s no space for even inspiration to land.
So as I started to like just keep turning even ever deeper into the awful feeling of the grief and loss on these many things, it started to kind of process. And my meditation practice had a massive unlock. After six years of kind of treading water, of course, you and I started working more on one-on-one coaching.
You kept on prodding me and I remember one point, it was midsummer, you’re like, yeah, you know, you’re that guy who like months down the road, you know, da da da. It’s gonna be completely different. You’re gonna be rocking this. And I’m like, yeah, whatever. Todd, if I hear that one more time, I’m gonna reach through the screen.
Todd: Was I right?
Brian: Yes. I also realized how heavily defended I was in this identity. Like, it’s not gonna happen. I don’t have what it takes. Not good enough, too old, you know, all these things. And then I, , took a three week road trip got into nature, hit like four national parks. And then like, all this year of learning and emotional processing and all this started just like really integrate. And I popped out and I was like, go time, let’s do this. And then just a few weeks later, I had my business founded, website, built and all this, you know, with all my energy.
And there’s just so much energy running through me now to, keep blazing forward on this. And the sense of purpose, the North Star got a bit brighter. I still don’t necessarily know what every next single step’s gonna be, but I don’t need to. I’m just kinda like following wherever the breadcrumbs feel alive and surrendering.
I mean, that’s been such a big thing, like this idea of letting go of the white knuckle of control, of my life and my career and just trusting that somehow things are gonna work out. And I’d never been in that position. I’d never been, you know, laid off or let go or anything.
I was like, o what’s, what’s that kind of surrender look like? So it’s like a lot of late stage learnings and things have, you know, come my way as well
Todd: It just makes me happy that you’re here talking to Chris and I, because you can question how could I be so confident that you were gonna get to the other side of this? Right? And I can tell you that in 20 years of doing this. There is a level of predictability around transformation that the reason why I was confident you were gonna get here now just a couple months later, is that you continually were turning into it.
You were curious, you were learning new skills, you were investing in yourself. You kept saying, I’m betting on Brian, even though this is uncomfortable. That’s what it takes. I just wanna really honor that. And that’s why we did this interview because. It’s motivating. ’cause a lot of this is personal work, like self work.
Looking at this notion of surrender, right? And letting go of this white knuckling is very powerful. One of the things that Chris and I do a lot of in our community is motivating people to allow and reflect. Just to allow. The limitation, the negativity, the feeling of being stuck to exist because there is value in that.
We don’t just pound our way to reinventing ourselves because then you end up in a cycle of being burned out again or not happy.
Brian: Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s been a hard lesson for me, but the reality of whatever emotions are coming up for me, whatever thoughts are coming up for me, they’re simply there. And if I try to suppress and deny them, then I’m lying to myself. I’m betraying myself yet again, not even listening to whatever the feelings are.
And that’s not to say like you stay stuck there at some point there’s a turn towards some kind of movement. But, you know, I’ve been in a lot of self-denial, of such things just powering on, you know, white knuckling it through one challenge after the next. And, you know, in my industry I was very much an occupational hazard of it. It’s like with a specter of someone dying on an operating table being a very much close to your daily thought process. It had this kind of motivating on the one side, like to bring my best, to the job, but then also like this collapsing, fearful, stance, almost. Had to like continually think about, look, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Is it reasonably foreseeable?
This, this constant thing. It was exhausting.
Chris: what I’m hearing is there’s really sharply strengthened neural pathway around what’s the worst that can happen, right? That you had to deploy in a sense, or was deployed as part of your career for such a long time. And then now over the past 15 months or more, right? As we talk about in reinvention, it’s a creative mode. It is a experimental mode, it’s a discovery mode, and while I think we talk about how it’s good to be aware of what worst case scenarios could be, being grooved into that neural pathway is not quite nourishing for that creativity. Like you said, the sort of controlled looseness, you know, letting the white knuckles off the steering wheel a little bit, that that can result in where you’re at, which I think is, we have to coin the word for whatever the opposite of self betrayal is.
Right? This is self-honoring, I think is the space that you’re in.
Todd: Yeah. So let’s talk about your reinvention, right? A lot of personal work, a lot of exploration. You did a lot of things right? And in a short period of time, you’re now looking out into the horizon here. And things are hopeful. And I think for our listeners and people that or in our community, it’s like really understanding the stories of what does emerge tactically. What are the structures that emerge for people? Somebody that had a very corporate job designing very serious equipment. What do you do now? So walk us through. What you are doing and what you’re looking to do and like how you got there, because it’s very, very important for people to understand that reinvention can go all over the map.
It could be something completely different or it could be something related too, there’s no one way this happens, but that’s why we love to hear stories about what people do.
Brian: I’m in a place of perhaps a foot in two worlds. One of the things that, landed for me really strongly, and, Chris, I think it was you who brought this idea of having, you know, potentially multiple income streams if I were to do consulting in my old medical device space.
I have a very substantial network here locally, and it’s a small industry anyway. And that feels pretty aligned for me while I’m skill building in what feels like really the next big chapter in my life.
And that is going even deeper into service in particular around what I feel is a, a substantial unmet need for a lot of men who are struggling. I’ve been involved in men’s work for five, six years, and I see, just one, one person after the next who’s, who’s really, really struggling and, and floundering.
But I found that in these communities, some guys are curious about my experience, what I have to say. How it comes through. And so it feels like there’s something there for me, and I still feel that pull that energy in that direction. So I’m just going with it. a long way of coming around to your question, but I’m going to where the energy feels alive, where it’s an expansive feeling to move in that direction versus like a contractive feeling move in that direction.
Like when I was looking at job postings, it felt very contractive. Even though it would’ve assured continued income without a break, all these things. So I’ve also really learned like what it means to discern between productive discomfort and the natural part of that. And anxiety coming out of fear versus excitement for a new frontier or a possibility.
Todd: But you’re also making money. You started, , consulting bridging what you did previously as you’re exploring. So you mentioned, I just wanna pick this apart. It’s really important, right? So you have a passion project, right? You know, you have something in front of you that you would love to do, doing some men’s work coaching, and you’re going in that direction.
But you also are bridging the gap right now by embodying, oh, I need to have a portfolio career here. I need to have multiple streams of revenue, and I have a skillset in designing these brain, equipment. And so you have found a way or are finding a way to make some money doing that, that’s giving you freedom to explore more creative endeavors.
And how did you do that? How did you turn a career that feels like just from the outside. How would I turn that into consulting, like designing, brain, surgery equipment, into maybe a fractional consulting job or, or something that’s also very juicy, for people.
’cause you gotta think about it this way. This is why I think you embody this, is like looking at it more creatively. How can I make some money to pay my bills? How can I, expand and think about the things that I’m really interested in? So I wanna shine more light on that, one piece.
Brian: How you do it, individual results may vary, I suppose. But for me, it’s simply been like recognizing that I’ve been in the space for a long time. I have a lot of contacts and so I, started reaching out to former colleagues and, you know, Hey, what’s going on?
I mean, one of them had, a contract design firm that, he had founded. Another one left my prior employer. We were on projects together back in the day. He’s now an engineering director at a local company, talking to him and others, and it’s just kinda like getting a feel for the lay of the land. And learning from them, what they’ve done. And then for me it was like, well, I could do the LinkedIn thing, which I won’t say much about. But I felt like if I had a website that at least had some of my portfolio on there, I could direct people to that and say, all right, well here’s stuff I worked on. Here’s my real bio. It’s a lot more personal. You know, I’ve designed, and I’m building this thing with the use of some AI tools that are like, just massive, massive, massive power ups.
And I’m just still like in this voracious learning mode, but now it’s AI assisted. There’s a whole host of challenges with it, you know, from both extremes. It’s amplifying both extremes of the human experience, to me it’s like dancing with a Genie, that’s got 80 or 90% of human recorded history at your fingertips and it doesn’t replace you because I’m still the creative driver in this interaction.
And that’s super important to remember. So I keep plugging away, you know.
Chris: That’s a really cool example again of skill building, right? I mean, one of the tenets we talk about in the reinvention community, right? You’re taking all your experience that you have and you’re redeploying that in a different way, right? Redeploying it in a consultative mode.
In order to do that, you’re like, Hey, let’s take on AI. Let’s take this head on and figure out how we can learn how to use. I mean we, we’ve got some inside baseball information ’cause we’ve talked to you a little bit about this in the community, I think you are astounded by some of the stuff you’re able to do I think it is one of those things that for a lot of people that are worried about sort of the specter of ai, like it’s taking jobs and it’s creating all this churn in the market for people who are in a reinvention mode that’s a really cool example of you can do all these things now that even a couple years ago, you probably would’ve had to hire out for, or you would’ve had to intensively learn about, you know,
Brian: in 10 hours, I went from knowing nothing about founding my own business, whether it’s gonna be a sole proprietorship, an LLC, an S corp, to having my paperwork filed, with the state, with the IRS and fiend for financial crimes, which I have to do. Didn’t know that. And like I had this whole trajectory in like less than 10 hours.
Which is
Todd: No, it’s unbelievable. It’s really, it
Chris: It’s an amazing time for people who are, who are exploring, hanging their own shingle.
Todd: I gotta say, man, you know, as we come to kind of the end of this episode, you know, just the idea of bringing you on was that Brian, you represent somebody that went through this process of reinvention. You know, Chris and I are really looking to map this out for people because I do believe that reinventing yourself successfully is a predictable process, right? And it just takes certain things that you have to go through and do to be able to do that. And now that we just had this very deep conversation, I really see just how clearly. You went through it almost like systematically, like you did it all right?
You really worked hard to get clarity and that was hard. You went through a lot of the personal stuff to like change your orientation and perception about who you are as a person who also needs to be in the world making money. You went out and reached out to your network and you kind of embodied the idea of making money in different ways to turn more into a creative consultant while also finding things that you’re passionate about, that in a very fun, light way you’re now exploring.
There’s not pressure to do this men’s work because you’ve already taken what you know how to do and starting to make some money doing that, you’re very much embodying the possibility of people that are out there wondering, what do I do? And so I’m really glad that we did this and I’m really grateful that you share your story because I just think it’s very motivating for people, especially those of us that are 45 and up 50 and up, that are like, what do I do? How can I possibly do all what Brian just said, well, you do what he just said by doing it, you know, by looking at yourself and taking a stand for Brian and for yourself. And so brother, I just honor you on that. And I really feel the energy of it so thank you.
Brian: Well, thank you. I mean, it’s, it’s a really, an honor and a delight to share and it’s probably doesn’t come through at all, but I consider myself very much an introvert as well. Classic engineer maybe in some ways, it’s just amazing what can happen when we start taking the self limits off of ourselves and, rediscovering, you know, what’s, what’s possible.
And the things that we didn’t think twice about when we were kids, we would just go out and do stuff and learn and didn’t get all wrapped up in worry and self-doubt, you know?
Chris: think it’s amazing to hear the story, Brian. ’cause I think it’s like you really did the work, right? You really were going through it and life was putting you through it and work was putting you through it. And then Todd was putting you through it, but you went and did the work.
Right? And I think that that’s awesome because it, I think exemplifies for some people who might be listening might be, you know, reinventors or reinvention curious or whatever it is, it’s pretty non-linear. It took some time and some doing and you had to go deep into it and, you’ve recoded some really tough experiences as you know.
Actually that was quite valuable in a way. And, you know, that involves through some pain and some challenges of course, but then also just taking away what you can take away to advance from it. I mean, it’s pretty profound, man. I really appreciate you sharing this with us and with hopefully people who are listening, certain that it kind of sparks some possibility for people.
Todd: Thanks for, being with us.
Brian: Thank for supporting me through this process.
Todd: your we got your back for sure man. And, uh, you know, more soon, I think this is motivating and so again, we Thank you so much, brother.
