If you’re in your 30s, 40s, or 50s and realizing, “I can’t just keep doing this for the next 20-25 years”…this episode is for you.
In this conversation, Todd Jason and Chris Thide go deep on one of the most overlooked pieces of any successful reinvention: Building New Skills on purpose. Not random courses. Not panicked certifications. Not shiny-object learning.
They first walk you through how to honestly assess the skills you already have, and then how to identify where the gaps are. This self-assessment is absolutely critical for anyone reinventing their career..
You’ll hear Todd and Chris unpack:
- Why clarity about your next chapter has to come before skill-building
- How to spot the skills you already have from your past career that you’re totally underrating
- Why almost every reinventor must eventually learn some version of sales, marketing, and money skills
- The Tony Robbins story: the one skill he chose to master that changed everything
- When to outsource (and why doing it too early can quietly kill your reinvention)
- How to drop the ego, embrace being a beginner again, and actually have fun learning
- A simple way to audit your own “skill gaps” so you know exactly what to work on next
This episode is blunt, practical, and surprisingly hopeful. If you’ve ever thought, “I’d love to reinvent myself…but I don’t have the right skills”, Todd and Chris will show you that you’re closer than you think, and that becoming a student again might be the most energizing move of your midlife.
Subscribe to the ReInvention Podcast to stay plugged into fresh ideas, frameworks, and real-world tools for navigating the future of your work and life.
Episode Transcript
Todd: He never would’ve been Tony Robbins and he literally did what we’re talking about here. He sat down with himself and he is like, what is it that I need to learn right now to get myself out of this mess?
Chris: So my man, Todd, what are we talking about today?
Todd: Yeah, Chris. Well man, this episode is as important as it gets when it comes to reinventing your career and also reinventing your life. Which is really why this notion of building new skills, what we’re talking about today is one of our six main tenets in the process of reinvention that you and I love and talk about all day long.
Today we’re gonna cover a way for you to accurately self-assess your current skills. And also give you a series of ideas to help you understand what the most important skills are for you to develop in the exploration of your career reinvention, super important stuff. Okay. And , our primary reason for doing this podcast, centers around the notion that your next career move can be your best one. So long as you crafted to be in alignment with the version of yourself you most want to become and not your past trajectory, and like what a revolutionary notion to start thinking about your career moving forward, that can actually have a lot of joy, a lot of fulfillment. Reinvention to me, Chris is energizing. It’s hopeful. It’s an opportunity where you get to become a student again. Right? And for a lot of people in mid-career, that’s a very crazy thing to think about, so in this episode, when we’re talking about building skills. We invite you to pay attention and also get out a pen and paper because in all of our episodes, ideas are going to pop for you. Like things are going to bubble up in your mind. You’re gonna get ideas about what to do next, and that’s why we’re doing this.
This whole idea of building new skills as you’re reinventing your career and your life, it’s gotta start with clarity, like Let’s talk about that a little bit.
Chris: Well, we made it the first tenet of reinvention for a reason, clarity, and we’ve done a bunch of episodes of this podcast now, and I don’t think there’s been one where we haven’t mentioned clarity at some point. Clarity of the big picture, overall clarity of the tactics.
And in this case, talking about skill building. You start from a place of clarity about what direction you’re gonna go in, in your reinvented career. As we were preparing preparing for this, we’re talking about this idea of, it’s not like you want to go out and learn every potential skill that you could use.
Right? Especially for people who are in midlife. You’re at this place where sometimes we have a feeling of, Hey, I don’t have. 70 years to figure this thing out. Right? I wanna figure it out quickly. I wanna move quickly so it’s getting clarity about what road or roads you might be going down, and then looking honestly at what skills you have and what skills you can tap into.
And we’ll spend time in this episode, talking about how to assess that. And just being smart about the choices that you make in terms of the experiments that you design, in terms of the learnings that you do, in terms of who you talk to and what you ask them, and what channels and avenues you use to build the right skills.
The best you know at this moment, it’s not the worst thing in the world If you spend some time learning a skill that you don’t necessarily end up needing all 100% of what you learned about it. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good enough here. Worse things have happened than getting good at something that doesn’t have 100% utility, right?
Todd: I agree. just in general, this idea of becoming a student, again, we’ve talked before in a previous episode about becoming the CEO of your own life. Like CEOs are learners, they’re not just dictating things to do, like they’re constantly looking at markets. And they’re making creative decisions, reinvention is an opportunity to become a creator again in your life.
When we talk about getting tactical and learning skills, yes, the first thing to do is to be smart about, well, what is it that you potentially want to create? And I’ve said this like a million times to you and to my clients, and on this podcast, most people simply don’t know what they want.
They don’t really have a felt sense in their body, in their heart about what career could actually light them up. And so we’re always gonna reiterate that, right Chris? We gotta start with this idea of, let’s think about your North Star. Let’s take a moment, as we’re in this podcast and you’re listening and you’re reinventing your career to think about what would be amazing for you, if everything just started to work out in a magical way? And then you start to pull back and you start doing some of these other things. You build a game plan, right? You start taking action. The things that we talk about, and when we talk about building skills, this is a real thing that you can learn how to do.
Starting with clarity is important because it will hone in what skills tend to be more important for your potential reinvention, and then you could start to be smart about learning those things. And so before we get into the tactics, I just wanna hammer that home so people really get that, that getting clarity is very much related to the skills that you’re gonna need to go out there and reinvent your career.
And most people just start learning a bunch of skills and they’re wasting time. And we don’t wanna do that. Like our goal is to help you speed up your process of successful reinvention. Which is why we always start with clarity.
Chris: We talked about this a little bit too, not that everyone who is reinventing their career is necessarily going down an entrepreneurial path, right? A lot of the people that we talk to and that we work with are going to become solo entrepreneurs or going to have more of a startup bent into what they’re doing. But not all of them. Not everybody, or at least not at first. We have people who we talk about who have portfolio careers or who are fractional leaders in the C-suite or whatever it is, but I think that there is an entrepreneurial spirit that is in common. We said this on a, a earlier episode, become the CEO of your own life, right? hover around that term, and that means that even if you’re in a traditional quote unquote organization and you’re staying in a traditional organization, but you’re reinventing your career and your approach to it, you are taking an entrepreneurial angle. You are acting like a company of one, even within that organization. One thing that almost everyone has to learn or at least tap into is their ability to sell, their ability to market. Ultimately, every business is sales. Right? and I say this and it gives me the heebie-jeebies, Todd, because I say this as a lifetime procurement guy. I was a buyer. I was always negotiating with the salespeople. I say that in jest because the truth is, is that when I went to hang my own shingle and I’m like, oh, I’m gonna have to sell to clients and bring them into my business. Even though it’s a people first business, it’s still a sales process. I don’t know how to do that. And this is the whole gist of this episode for the people who are listening who are excited about reinvention is, yes, I do know how to do that.
Do you know how many things I sold in my career? Do you know how many times I got budget for new headcount? Do you know how many times I got an executive to get behind an idea that they were dead set against at first? Do you know how many PowerPoint decks I put together to present something to get to marshal hundreds of people to all align to work on some big expensive project. All of that is sales. It’s all sales.
Todd: Let me just cut in for a minute so I like just track you for a minute.
What you’re saying is, is that, first point is that reinvention does not necessarily connote entrepreneurship, but for a lot of people it does.
And I completely agree with that. This is a moment in time that if you’re in the middle of your career and you’re either completely burned out or you have some ideas that you wanna start to explore to make some money. This is the time to think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Let’s just say it for what it is.
I would say, I dunno what your thought is on the number, but 80 to 90% of the people that are in some process of career reinvention are exploring entrepreneurship, which is why on this podcast we’re gonna focus a lot on skill building for entrepreneurs because it actually applies to a lot of different things.
And within that. You then went to sales, to be an entrepreneur, you gotta sell a product, you gotta sell yourself, right? This is scary for a lot of people, and you mentioned that we’ve talked about this before, but we will do one if not several episodes on selling.
I mean, this is my background. I was a salesperson in my career for the first 15 years. A top sales person at some big companies this is what I was trained in and how to sell. And turning that into selling my own business is actually a very different thing than selling someone else’s product. Okay, but your point is that we all know how to sell because no matter what job we are in, and you’re mentioning VP of procurement, your career, you are selling stuff all the time. So I think that’s a really important point when you’re thinking about reinventing and building new skills, is this notion that lay out the skills that you may need to learn out on the table.
And don’t just think of some of them like oh my God, I don’t know how to do that, or I’m scared to do that. But actually something that you already know how to do. You’re always selling stuff like even in personally in your family,
and I think people have to understand that. And what I found as a really valuable tool is not just like lay it out there, but understand and assess your own ability to sell. How do you influence people? what makes your, process of influence valuable. How do you influence people successfully?
This is a really interesting thing for people to self-assess because then you can take that and then you can apply it in other areas, IE your reinvention. Right? And so I think what you’re saying is, Hey, you gotta learn how to sell and you already know how to do it. Let’s just get really clear on how we do it as individuals.
Is that fair to say? Is that
Chris: Absolutely. And I think you said a great point there too at the end, especially where it’s like you’re tapping into your uniqueness here, right? Especially for the people who are gonna go hang a shingle and be fully entrepreneurial, we were talking about this with someone in our community, two people actually recently, where we kind of called for them to say, Hey, you’re putting your website together for your new entrepreneurial venture. Like, give us more of your personality in that. We wanna see more of you and they both were sort of hesitant to say, well, I don’t know if I want to be front and center on this.
And it’s like, yeah, but your background, which maybe you didn’t make this connection, your background is so valuable to help tell this story about this new thing that you’re doing. And people buy from people, right? I mean, that’s one thing I can tell you as a. Buying professional for 20 years of my career is, I was the big bad wolf who had to come in and pry the salesperson away from my engineers and tech people because the relationship sold the deal.
Once you kind of like broke the spell and talked to the tech people, a lot of times they’re like, yeah, we don’t really need this product. It doesn’t really integrate well into our tech stack and it probably has cybersecurity issues and it’s not really that well made. You know, the relationship, did all the work there. I’m coming at this with a bit of a jaundiced eye about sales and sales processes and that sort of thing, but then also realizing that, well, it’s what I have and what’s unique about me and my charisma and personality and magnetism are critical to my sales process. Right? I mean, especially for a one-on-one and one to few client business. The people I think who are sitting here most skeptically like, well, I never did sales in my life, I bet you did. And there’s something special about you if you’re even thinking about this, about reinventing yourself and maybe hanging your own shingle.
You’re doing that ’cause there’s something special and unique about you and you’re gonna tap into and be able to fuel this element of what you need to do.
Todd: so wise. I’ve seen this so many times in 20 years with people deciding to reinvent, going out there with something that is more closely related to their heart or to their passion or their purpose or whatever. But then there’s like this layer of protection around being authentic, just taking a stand for the thing.
I’ve done this, right? You’re doing it we all do it. There’s this fear of being seen. That if you can just name it for what it is, and then allow yourself the ability to cross that bridge gently and you become authentic. And it’s a vulnerable thing, you know, to reinvent yourself. This is why we’re doing this, because people are scared to reinvent.
There’s old identity, this old trajectory that you’ve been telling the story for 10, 15, 20 years and it’s easy and you tell it at dinner parties and you tell it at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, right? You tell the story and now you’re stepping into either by force or because you’re just incredibly burned out, a new story and a new identity, and you wanna protect yourself from it. And that thing needs to be addressed and crossed over. Because what I can tell you in helping a lot of people do this is that the authenticity is what sells. The human element is what sells. And AI’s gonna come in and so much content’s gonna be out there selling us on all kinds of things.
But human beings buy from human beings. We are energy at our core, okay? And we connect with people. If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s because, to some degree, you like the way that Chris and I talk about things. We have a way of expressing things and that resonates with you, and so you wanna be able to take our modeling here and apply that to whatever form of reinvention that you’re doing because.
It is gonna be some portion of you being authentic that does allow sales to happen. The truth is, Chris, this is what I found. We all want to be seen as valuable for who we really are. And for people to buy who we really are. That’s the dream, right?
I could just be fully authentic, fully me, and that’s driving my business, that’s driving my money making, that’s driving my lifestyle. That’s the dream. And I think that’s what reinvention is. It’s that opportunity. So when we talk about this moment in time of building new skills, it sounds very tactical, but we just gotta rip it open a little bit and say, Hey, this is your opportunity.
To just get in touch with who you are, what you want to do, get that clarity and then start building some skills. Because I also wanna challenge you now a little bit on the sales part, right? You clearly said that in your career, you know how to sell, but you’re also just, ’cause I know you we’re business partners, it’s an issue, right?
And you have some insecurity around going out and selling, talk me through your process of that one piece. ’cause it’s like you have your own business and now you’re actually having to go out there and enroll people and that’s somewhat of a different thing.
Chris: You brought us to a place that is a core element of this conversation around reinvention and specifically around building new skills, which is that this is an ego dropping moment for big humility, right? And putting on the white belt and being a beginner and saying, I have the ability, I have the core ability to craft and tell and sell a story and to frame things up in a way that’s gonna land with people and to think empathetically about the audience and the potential client or the prospect and how it’s gonna, you know, I have all those skills, but the actual structure around that I’m still learning just literally basic structure around some of that stuff and how to deliver that in a way for my clientele, potential clientele that that lands with. Right. I would say that every client I’ve signed has been almost like an ad hoc wrestling match for me to figure out the right way to like communicate to this person. To say that I have a clean, crisp sales process is like, I’m just still getting there. For me, I’ll say, it’s a good model to learn from. It’s maybe not a great model to follow. Right? I’d, say that in the beginning I was really maybe overconfident, right? I’m a charismatic guy, I can do this.
I know I’m a good coach. I’m seeing that. So obviously that’ll translate and I didn’t approach it with the right humility and ask for help and seek training and invest in myself and sign up for a course or anything like that for 18 months at least, I really didn’t do any of that stuff.
I sort of just was winging it. And so I would say it’s not just around sales. This is an important concept around any skill that we need in our reinvention, that we be humble. Honestly assess where am I in this journey? If I have some natural skills, and I think that I am blessed and lucky that I do have some natural skills in this area, but I could use some structured learning in this area.
So what does that mean? What do I have to spend some time working on and focus on? Well, maybe I have to select who’s gonna be able to help me create the right sales process. Who are the people who are doing what I wanna do, that I can learn from, that I can imitate, that can be models for me.
Todd: Well, let’s talk about that for a minute, because look what you did. I just have to jump in here because you partnered with me, somebody that has a background in sales and you know, we’ve had conversations. You’re like, Hey, we gotta get on a call. I need to understand exactly how you sell. What is your script?
What is your thing? Now we’re getting into a little bit of the tactics and we’re talking about sales. Okay? But this could apply to anything.
this is a moment in time as you’re reinventing to not isolate yourself. Get out there and learn what you need to. This is a time to invest in yourself.
This is a time to invest in books, podcasts, courses, like spending money on things that can help you get to the next level. Like you did that, right? You went to NYU to get certified in coaching. You didn’t just come out of your career and say, I’m gonna be a coach. You actually did a lot of smart things.
You said, all right, I need to learn how to do this. Okay, but now you’re broadening your landscape and like, oh, well, I also need to learn, let’s say sales and marketing and what you did, what you found was a business partner that can help you do that and accelerate your ability. This is reinvention. You completely model it by just showing up every day and being curious and having that open mind and seeing what wants to show up for you, but also seeking it out.
what I love to say on this is that once you start to get clear on your skills that you have. And you can start to expand that list and see, okay, actually I have more skills that will apply to my reinvention. But you also start to recognize the areas that you have some weakness or you have some holes that you need to fill and you want to go out and you wanna systematically learn those things.
Okay? You can, it’s not too late. The message here is that it’s not too late to learn new things like I’m learning every day, reinvention is an opportunity to be alive, to be a student, to learn new skills, to experiment, find communities. This is why I love our community. ’cause people come in here and they’re in the same boat and they need to learn new skills.
And they’re like open-minded and they feel safe because they’re in an environment where people are also reinventing. And guess what? There’s people in the community that know how to do certain things and others who don’t know how to do certain things, and that’s the energy that you wanna be around.
Reinvention goes in stages. As we’ve talked about several times on this podcast, and in the beginning stages, there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of doubt. There’s a lot of worry, concern, financial. It’s a very real thing that people go through. And then you start to get to this next layer where you start to see, all right, there’s opportunity for me to start to match up my life and my lifestyle and my work and my moneymaking with, things that I actually like to do.
Huh? That’s fun and interesting, and that’s where it gets juicy, and that’s where you wanna start doing this work, finding communities, investing in yourself, modeling others. You mentioned that. Here’s the thing, no matter what idealistic career path, even at the most ideal level, like for me, it could be like, oh, you wanna be the next, I don’t know, Tony Robins or something, somebody that’s been really successful.
Okay. And I’m not comparing myself to Tony, but just as an example, there are already so many people that are doing that thing, and doing it really successfully and making a lot of money and having the impact and the lifestyle that you want. And guess what? 90% of them aren’t nearly as good as you. Meaning you can learn, you can learn how to do it, and that’s what’s missing for a lot of people.
They don’t look at themselves as a student where I can just be like, a learner. You know, like learning stuff, experimenting, learning, experimenting, like taking in data and experimenting. That’s reinvention in a nutshell right there to me. And that’s how you get to that success faster.
Chris: listen, you’re pulling in some stuff. I mean, I know we had an episode that just dropped today that’s around, positivity and keeping that growth mindset what you really got to, that’s really important and a core concept that we face all the time in reinvention is this idea well the people that got successful in the thing that you wanna do, have something special about them.
And yeah, of course there’s a spectrum of talents that we all have in different areas and people are different. But the truth is, and this is the sad truth maybe is, that they’re not that different than you. They really aren’t. I mean, you put Tony Robbins as an example, right?
Tony’s the 1% of that category. So if you’re gonna compare yourself to Tony Robbins, like everything about that guy is big and outsized and whatever. But like, do you know how many other people in that category are super, super successful? And do you know how many other potential clients there are on the planet for you to tap into?
So, I mean, we hear it in our community and we lovingly shake it out of people when we hear it, but it’s like, why me? Why do I think I can do this? Who’s gonna work with me? It’s all taken up. It’s all been done. There’s like a 75 different iterations of things that people could say. Really what they’re doing when they say that is letting themselves off the hook of in the work and being humble and looking at people who are doing better than them in the thing that they want to do, and feeling that feels gross. It doesn’t feel good actually. You kind of look at those people and go, man, why can’t I do that? And then it’s like, oh, what? Why can’t I do that?
Frame that into, okay, how can I learn from that person? I mean, this is deep stuff in this moment, right? ’cause it takes a lot of just ego absorption and saying, okay, I’m gonna be humble enough to look at the people that have the life and the career that I want, that they’re doing what I wanna do and I’m gonna learn from them.
I’m not just gonna envy them.
Todd: I love that. And actually staying on the Tony Thread, ’cause you know that I worked with Tony Robbins, I’ve interviewed him twice. And look, he’s built almost a billion dollar organization as a life coach Okay. And a motivational speaker. And he runs events and all all that. But he tells a really great story, and this is very relevant to what we’re talking about today, about how early in his career he kind of came out and he had all this content and he had a business partner that actually screwed him pretty bad and he almost lost everything. He never would’ve been Tony Robbins and he literally did what we’re talking about here. He sat down with himself and he is like, what is it that I need to learn right now to get myself out of this mess?
You know what? It was financial planning. Tony Robbins said, I don’t understand money and I need to understand money if I’m gonna be who I think I can be. If I need to reinvent myself to be this speaker and this author, and whoever he’s become, I need to learn finances. Okay. He was already good at sales.
He was already a great teacher. He said, this is what I need to learn. This is what screwed me. This is the perfect story for this, right? Because then he went ahead and he studied and he learned finances pretty hardcore. And then he hired like a high level CFO for his company early on, paid the CFO a lot of money, and that’s what got him out of this impending mess that he was in and then catapulted him to becoming who he is today, which is like the biggest player in his industry.
All right, so it’s a really good story that this notion of building skills is very real. Okay. And so if you’re sitting there listening to this and you’re in a process of reinvention and you’re thinking, man, I have a lot of different ideas, or I have one idea or a couple that I wanna start exploring. We want you to start really getting tactical about where’s your weak point?
Where are the things that you’re not great at? What can you do to learn those things? What communities can you find. Who can you follow on a podcast? What book can you buy? Take it on, turn towards it. That’s where the threads will unravel and you’ll find yourself in a much different place, become an expert.
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger is another amazing example of this. I know I’m picking up all these people and I get to see Arnold sometimes at the gym that I go to in Venice Gold. Yeah, that’s right. I see Arnold sometimes very motivating to see him.
Chris: Good to see you again. Todd. It’s great to see you at the gym today Todd. You look great. You’re looking very buff.
Todd: He’s never said anything to me. But if he did, he would probably say that.
Chris: Todd, wait, sorry. Did you PR on the bench press, recently? Is
that
Todd: I did, I did, I am 52 years old, man. I am at my max.
Chris: That’s amazing dude.
Todd: Yeah, and by the way, the environment counts. Just being in that environment with people that are lifting heavy weights counts. Like I am reinventing my exercise routine and part of what I’m doing, learning new skills is going to a place where I can find that motivation and I can look at other people that are so far ahead of me and learn from them.
You know what I’ve learned on the weightlifting, sorry, we’re going off on a tangent here, but I’ve watched these people that are like really adept at weights. They spend a lot of time in the gym and most of it is just sitting around. There’s a lot more rest. So I went up to one of the big bodybuilders that at Gold’s Gym I said, do you mind if I ask you a question?
I said, you know, you hear a lot that you rest two or three minutes in between sets. He’s like, no, I rest 12 minutes in between sets. I’m like, seriously? He’s like, yeah I’ll be at this brunch press for the next 45 minutes and I’ll do four sets. So my point is, there’s another example of learning new skills.
So I started doing that and it’s radically increased my strength. I was sold this bill of goods that actually wasn’t true. But Arnold’s a good example too, because, when he was training. His calf muscles were like tiny and by far the weakest thing. And he turned to that and built up his calf muscles, even though all of his mentors said, you’ll never be able to do it.
You just don’t have that ability, like the way you’re structured won’t be able to have big calf muscles. And of course that became one of his most famous things. So the opportunity to reinvent is always there, and you wanna be able to self-assess what you’re good at and also where you are weak, and then go into the areas that you have weakness.
We’ve been talking a lot about sales and marketing because I think a lot of people that come from corporate don’t really have that mindset that I know how to sell. I know how to market. It’s not necessarily true, but there’s also other areas like we also have somebody in our community right now who came from a sales background and his challenge is operations.
He has no idea how to run a business. He has no idea how to map out finances, like just wasn’t what he was doing. He could sell anybody anything, but he can’t do that. And our recommendation to him is, Hey, learn operations, start to learn how to build a business. There’s a lot of places that you can go to do that, including our community, right?
So I think it’s not just sales Chris, right? It’s a bunch of different things.
Chris: We just use that as a great example for many, many people are going to need to tap into that in whatever form their reinvention takes. I want to go back to when you’re talking about Tony Robbins, one thing I want to latch onto that I think is really cool, ’cause you’re talking about financial planning, that was his weakness that he leaned into.
We’ll talk about financial planning in an upcoming episode. Financial planning is a key factor for Reinventors, especially if you’re gonna hang your own shingle or go fractional or do a portfolio career, whatever it is, you need to have your financial game plan on a personal level together.
And of course on a business level as well
Todd: I just gotta interject for one second and then this is your thing. This is where you have a superpower and I can’t wait for that episode to record it with you ’cause I’m gonna learn from you. ’cause it’s something that you have done really well, creating runway, like planning it out.
Sorry to interject there, but I’m just saying it’s a superpower that you have.
Chris: Great example, because I wouldn’t say it’s a super power. I would say it’s something I really focused on and really put a lot of effort into doing, and I’m no different than anybody else. I think that, you know, I’m not like Zach Galifianakis with the equations coming down the escalator situation, right? I just put some focus on it and worked on it, and that’s what I think is great. A lot of this stuff we’re talking about, none of it is necessarily rocket science. You can learn it. But another element of that, that Tony Robbins story I wanted to tap into, which I think is very important, and it was actually in my notes before we started to record this, is when you have a weakness as a reinventor, let’s say, or as an entrepreneur.
In an area you don’t know anything about. I would argue that you might want to outsource it eventually. I want you to learn enough about these areas to be able to intelligently if it truly is a weakness for you and truly is an area that you can’t build the strength up in to the level that you think is required.
I want you to know enough to be able to know that you’re getting the right inputs and outputs from that area and that you can intelligently, select who you outsource it to and how. There’s a lot of gurus online there, like just hire someone to do this for you and you know, if that’s not your skill, just hire it out. And I think what happens is a lot of people way too early in their entrepreneurial journey go to try to hire out somebody to do a thing that is like a black box to them, and that’s how you lose a lot of money.
Todd: You wanna be able to get yourself to a level of at least low competency in virtually all of the main areas of what you’re looking to do before you outsource, because then you won’t make good decisions about who to outsource, and you are gonna lose control. I’ve seen so many people fail in their businesses because of this very thing, so it’s a really, really good point.
That’s why building new skills is really important. That’s why you wanna look out into the landscape of your potential reinvention and be like, all right, what is it that I wanna do. I need to become a content creator, right? I need to start going out on social media and creating a personal brand.
Another one of my clients is in that mode right now. ’cause that’s important for him, for what he potentially wants to do. And so what I said was, instead of just going out there and posting on social media. Follow people that you admire that have a following that are doing well, and literally sit there, because I did this on social media and for one month watch what they do and take notes.
Become a student of it before you just start doing it. So I went through a whole process with him on this and for a month he literally followed all these people, like learned from ’em and he called me. This is the best advice you ever gave me because I would’ve just come in at a very low level, and just done all this crazy stuff.
And then his plan was to actually outsource it, record a bunch of videos, and then have a va, just start taking that and chopping it up into social media channels. And I’m like, that’s a recipe for disaster. You have to have some level of competence about what this is before you can outsource, which is why doing the landscape approach about, alright, what are the skills that I need to learn based on the things that I wanna do, is so very important because then you can start to get a little tactical on it.
But then you’re right. There comes a point just like the Tony Robbins story, where then you outsource it and then he hired a very high level CFO who was way further ahead than him, but he was able to hire that person because he knew enough to be able to outsource. So that’s a very important part for Reinventors that are looking to go that entrepreneurial venture.
You need to become a jack of all trades. You need to be a financial planner. You need to understand marketing. You need to understand digital marketing. You need to understand how to use AI to build your business. ’cause that’s very relevant right now. We’ll be doing episodes on that. You need to understand sales, you need to understand all these things, right?
To be able to get to a level of competency. But it’s your opportunity, for me, it’s like you live and you breathe it, you know? And that’s where the juice is. Reinvention is an opportunity to really live a fulfilling journey. So why not learn all the skills that you need to? So I love that you brought that up, and I think that’s really relevant.
Chris: listen, I also wanna emphasize what I think you’re getting at too, which is that this is fun. It’s a lot. It’s challenging. It might be stressful. It’s probably gonna be scary at times. It’s definitely gonna be scary at times. I mean, that’s reinvention. Change is in the name. Change is scary to humans.
Accept that that’s part of it. It’s gonna be new. Especially if you’ve got a 20 or 30 year corporate career and you’re used to being really good at this thing that you’ve been doing the whole time. We are calling on you as part of this to do things that you’re actually pretty bad at.
that is gonna be, part of it is You’re gonna be a novice in these things and that’s okay. Like we said, you’re gonna have to drop the ego and get humble about it. But like, it’s fun. It is fun for me to learn new things and I said this before, I’m stumbling and bumbling sometimes, and I don’t really have the clearest path to figure it out.
And a huge part of what we do with this podcast and with our reinvention coaching community is help people get there faster and in a straighter line than the, circuitous path that I have taken, let’s say. I mean, I’m having more fun and I have been in this phase of my career than I ever did in my prior career. But it’s like adventure and fear are two sides of the same coin, right? They come together, you know, so we’re putting you in a place where it might feel a little uncomfortable as you learn something new, but that’s all part of it.
Todd: Yeah, man, I love that. And we can close this episode out on that point that it’s gotta be fun, it’s gotta be light and that’s a hard thing because when people have financial stress and identity crisis around, what am I gonna do? Like, how can you say, oh, it’s gonna be fun and we’re here to tell you it is.
You know? And it can be, which is why we built a community around it. Because in that community, that is like one of our main things is like having fun along the way, and if you can hold it that way and be light and be positive and optimistic, as you’re reinventing, you’re giving yourself the best shot to find success faster.
Right. And you keep saying my magic word. I love speed. I love helping people get their faster. That’s what we’re doing. So my brother man, always so good to be doing these episodes with you. Like really I learned a lot. I always learn a lot. It always reiterates the things that I’m going through as well.
And I hope that as a listener, you’re benefiting and please subscribe to our podcast, follow us along here, wherever you find our content, because we’re gonna continue doing this on and on and on again, there’s so many different lenses that we can wear around reinvention, right? We have endless topics that we can talk about on this.
And we’ll be bringing in a lot of experts as well, to be rounding out some of the teachings that we’re talking about, and we just look forward to getting to know you as well. So, thank you, Chris.
Chris: Hey Todd. Thanks so much. As always, man, it’s always such a pleasure and for everybody listening, we’re so excited to keep helping you out and meet you soon.
