What careers actually have a future in an AI-driven world?
In this episodeTodd and Chris get real about the future of work, what AI is actually going to disrupt, and how to build a career that’s hard to replace because it is rooted in your uniquely human skills.
They discuss the emerging statistics (like 39% of core job skills changing by 2030), why endlessly scrolling LinkedIn for the same old roles has diminishing returns, and why the smartest move right now is to think of yourself as the CEO of your own life and career.
You’ll hear real client stories: a laid-off designer who turned his expertise plus AI into a new business, a burned-out exec who became a highly paid workshop leader for his former company, and mid-career professionals who are quietly building second careers in coaching, community, and creator work.
If you’ve ever thought, “Who am I to do that? There are already so many people doing it…” this conversation is your invitation to think bigger, experiment more, and start building a future-proof career that actually fits the life you want.You’ll learn:
- Why AI is absolutely going to replace certain tasks and roles… and which parts of your job are most at risk
- The durable “human skills” that are only becoming more valuable
- How to honestly audit your current role for what’s automatable vs. what’s uniquely you
- Why experimentation beats perfection, and how to treat your next moves like low-risk “life experiments” instead of irreversible bets
- How to handle the fear of judgment (“who am I to do this?”) and start sharing your work or ideas without waiting to be “ready”
**Subscribe to our ReInvention Podcast and stay on the cutting-edge with fresh ideas and practical tools to navigate the future of your work!
Episode Transcript
Chris: I’m not telling you to monetize all your hobbies, but if you’re telling me you’re miserable at work and you do a thing that you could literally just put the camera on yourself for half an hour a day while you do that. You’d probably have 50,000 TikTok followers in two months. All right, Todd, what’s top of mind today? What are we talking about today?
Todd: Well, this is a big one, right? When we’re talking about reinvention and a lot of the work that we do as coaches is mentally and emotionally preparing human beings for the changes that are happening right now in our world, in our culture, and in work.
There’s so much change happening for people’s work, and that’s what the call of reinvention is. And today we’re gonna be talking a little bit more tactical about the what. What types of jobs, what types of careers? As we’re reinventing the call is to be grounded and sober and just present with how can we all make smart decisions about the future of our careers.
So that way we’re setting ourselves up for long-term security and sustainability. That’s our premise. And not only that, I think what makes you and I a little bit unique and why we came together is that this moment in time also holds the seeds for opportunity, if you can get yourself to really see that. Meaning that I believe, and I’ve seen this happen with so many clients, that for those of us that take on this moment with that reinvented positive attitude and you start aligning the lifestyle that you want, right?
And what are your real talents and what are your real gifts? And you start really looking at how you can marry that with your potential money making, like the sky’s the limit, right? Mm-hmm. So there is that there. And I think today we wanna be talking about, what are the career paths and jobs that are out there that will afford me the opportunity to have the best shot at making that happen?
Chris: Yeah. And I think there’s a really cool thing there. For me what is so exciting about reinvention and what I’ve been living through my own reinvention, is it seems like with each passing day, still years into this thing, that I get to reveal more of myself, right? I get to lean into more of who I am and what makes me unique and not just for the fun of it, because that is fun and it is really engaging and great for the way I live my life, but also in a way that serves my business.
And the uniqueness of me and my creative thoughts, or maybe my different takes on things or whatever it is, those are all becoming business assets for me. And I think that that’s a really cool area, people that maybe are a little further into reinvention are discovering. And I think we want to help people who are considering it or people who are in it really start to lean into that.
What is truly, my unique value proposition is the way we’d call it in a corporate setting.
Todd: Well, it’s really relevant, Chris, because what I tell people is. You need to be the CEO of your own life right now. Right? And that doesn’t mean that every reinventor is gonna become an entrepreneur.
Like you may, a lot of people are turning towards entrepreneurialship to some extent. But you need to start wearing the lens that you’re here right now, the future’s in front of you, and you can make good decisions that are aligned with what your unique selling propositions are, IE your skills, your passions, your interest with the business side of it, and the money making, right?
Yeah. And so that’s the moment in time that we’re in right now. And doing some research , for this episode. There’s a couple of interesting statistics that we came across. Number one is that 39% of key job skills, at least here in the US, are going to change by the year 2030, right?
That means that. According to this one research study, we found 60% of workers will need upskilling or reskilling, right? So we are in a moment of change, and we all know that. But even more interesting, eight out of 10 of the most requested and emerging skills that are necessary are durable human skills, right?
So communication, problem solving, leadership. Look, AI is definitely here. It’s, and we are gonna see it’s disruption. We’re already seeing disruption, okay? Mm-hmm. And like it is on, and a lot of people that listen to this are already experiencing the disruption or they know it’s coming. And one of the main messages that we want to get across, or at least I wanna get across and we’ll see what you think, is that humans are always going to need humans, right?
Like AI is gonna solve a lot of problems and do a lot of things, but we resonate with the uniqueness of being humans. And I think what we’re gonna see, and we have a lot of data to back this. Is that the jobs and careers of the future will start to gravitate towards more of those human elements, those human services, as AI kind of replaces a lot of the things that can be more easily automated.
Chris: I think as much as people talk about AI from a fear perspective, right, where they say AI is gonna take all these jobs, it’s gonna eliminate all these jobs, it’s going to be very disruptive. that is true. That’s all true. Jobs will be eliminated, jobs will be disrupted. People will have to change what they do. People will have to learn what they do. But I think we like to look at things through the positive lens. And I think the positive lens is also well supported here, which is cool. How exciting. How exciting that this might be an opportunity we’re all coming from this place of like, oh my God, AI’s gonna take my job.
But what if you hate your job? Is that such a bad thing? If AI takes your job in the sense of, if it prompts you to think, Hey, AI’s coming, what can I do? What do I do that’s unique, that’s human, that is really defensible? What’s my human moat around a skillset that AI can’t go for?
And you start now at the end of 2025 or 2026, thinking about how you’re gonna turn that into the rest of your career. And then what if you happen to do that and that turns into a job that you actually f-ing love.
Todd: And it makes money, right? This conversation really spurned for me about a year ago.
I think I told you this, Chris, I interviewed this guy, Bill Burnett, who runs the Designing Your Life Institute at Stanford University. Right? And he’s written a book called Designing Your Life. He’s a great guy. He talks a lot about this. And I’m gonna bring him back on our show. Okay? We’re gonna interview him here.
I’m gonna reach out to him to see if he wants to come back and have this conversation. But he said something really jarring in that first interview. And he’s at Stanford, right? The creme de la creme of engineering, science, mathematics. And he said that he’s going to all of the CS departments, the computer science departments, mathematics, engineering, all of them undergrad and grad, and ringing the bell, telling these people don’t do this.
These careers are over. And you could imagine the flux of these, not only the kids, but the families who spend their entire lives living and dreaming, trying to. They’re a kid in a situation where they can get into Stanford and do these jobs. And he is saying, there’s no careers here, right?
There’s no careers here. AI is going to replace a lot of these jobs. Okay? Now, I’m not saying that’s definitely the case, but that’s what he’s saying. That’s what he said to me on a public talk. Okay? And, then I asked him the most obvious question, well then what’s next? What should they be doing?
Right? And he says, interestingly, that there’s going to be a resurgence in his opinion at the academic level of people interested in the humanities and creativity and art and writing. Things that are more human to an extent. And then the next question, of course, is well then how is that gonna work?
Is everyone just gonna be artist and writing books? How is money gonna work and how are economies gonna work? And his answer was, well, economies will change, and so all this to say is that no one really knows what the future holds, but we’re all here right now, and you’re listening to this conversation, and you’re in a moment of transition, right?
Like so many millions of people are. And the call is to get more situated in the idea that the future of your career can be more expansive, and more fulfilling than maybe you ever thought before. And the data is showing that, right? Yeah. So a lot of people come to us, Chris, right? In an area of like, well, does that mean that I’m gonna hang my own shingle and be a coach and a consultant, or I’m gonna start doing fractional work?
there’s not enough room for that, that’s Not the case, right? We’re looking at a time where there’s so many humans in transition and that’s one area that from what we found and I believe is gonna grow, helping other humans in transitions in an area that you’ve already done that or are doing it, is a huge area that is gonna generate tons of revenue and support.
Right. So that’s just one idea of how you could start thinking about making a transition in your career. Yeah. That’s aligned with the future that’s emerging.
Chris: Even to go back to what, your relation to what Bill Burnett said, i, I want to listen to that and go understand that.
And I look forward to talking with Bill actually about that. Mm-hmm. it resonates with me on some level. I mean, I’m not sure I go in and say to the engineering department, the jobs are gone. Right. I could imagine the reaction to that. Yeah. But I do, I think about everything, especially in the area of AI and the way that technology is working.
I look at it like it’s an opportunity for people to level up even within their industry. So if you think about a junior developer, a junior software developer at this point, can’t quite be replaced by AI in this moment, but can in many ways, a lot of that work can be replaced by AI, but that’s an opportunity for a junior developer to become a more senior developer to look at this, to say, oh, if I learn how to leverage AI to write 30,000 lines of code in the time it takes me to write three. Then I can become more of an orchestrator, more of an architect, more of a big picture person.
To me, that’s a really cool opportunity for someone to, I don’t know, maybe they’re gonna build their own app in a way that they never were going to to years ago because they were the junior developer cranking through those lines of code for somebody else’s app. Right? So I think there’s that perspective of how can I not run away from this thing?
How can I run into it and learn about it and leverage it? And how can it level me up?
Todd: Yeah. It’s funny you say that because, a client that I was working with last year was a top level designer, like graphic designer in Silicon Valley, worked for a lot of big companies, startups, like really successful and was shown the door at his last job.
And then really went through a hard time of trying to replace that income, like trying to get another job. Making the money that he was used to to support his family. He’s got two kids, right? and kind of came to me, and was like, it’s not working. I’ve been scouring LinkedIn and there’s no jobs for me any longer, you know, at least, with the security and the income.
And so I said, well, what else can we do out there? And I said that very thing. Can you figure out a way to leverage what you know using design and AI because he understands it really well, and start training other people to use AI in design settings. And voila, like the light bulb went on for him and he went out and started to create his own business around it and his own community where he is now teaching other designers or people who aren’t even come from a design background, but have some level of skill in the design area and wanna learn how to use the emerging tools of AI to stay ahead, right? Because it’s changing so fast. And so his job has now become as a harnesser of the emergent technology of AI as it relates to design, and implementation. And he’s doing really great and it’s led him on a bunch of unexpected paths. And I think that kind of embodies what you just shared.
And also if you’re somebody that wants to do that and be a bridge, then that can be one way to look at how you can take your existing skills and the emerging technologies and make something of it, that is useful and helpful because at the end of the day, there’s so many people behind you, wherever you’re at in terms of understanding, in terms of whatever wisdom that you have.
And so I think we need to look at it that way, that we’re here to like turn around and help others. Yes. With ai, maybe in some other areas, but I think that’s a really good example, right? And I think that backs up what you were sharing.
Chris: If I think about tactically, like what would I do, right?
If I were considering this, if I were considering the impact of technology or the job market on what I do, what my industry is, I would take a real honest look at myself and look at my workday, and look at my work week and say, what elements of this that I’m doing have staying power? Again, AI is the buzzword.
We’re kind of thinking about that. But let’s use that. It’s more than just AI. But if you look at, well, if I’m doing, if I’m spending half of my week doing rote repeatable data analysis tasks, well then honestly, you need to say to yourself, that part of my job is at risk. To go away or change in some way.
So if I am speaking to my boss every two weeks, and that’s the part that they’re so interested in, and that’s the part that’s kind of keeping me a key part of this organization, well put a pin in that. You might want to think about that. Whereas there are parts of your work for almost all of us it depends where you are in an organization or where you are in your career that are more esoteric, more subjective, more taste based, more human. Mm-hmm. And the list goes on as to what makes something human in that respect more about you uniquely your unique value proposition. That’s the part that I think is defensible.
That’s the part that I think you can say, well, I can lean into this if you’re interested. I can lean into this and I can grow this. How can I make that more of my job? Maybe that’s my whole job. I think that mindset and being really honest with yourself and not complacent and saying, yeah, actually I think this part’s gonna go away in five years.
Be able to have that real conversation with yourself.
Todd: Yeah. I love it. It’s a self-assessment about what human attributes you do really well. That whether you believe it or not really is unique to you. Okay. Because the things that are not unique to you are most likely gonna be replaced, which is I think another way of saying what you just shared.
So this is a really great moment in time to understand and self-assess, what is it that I do the way that I communicate, the way that I coach, the way that I help others, the way , that I think about new ideas, the way that I lead, , the way that I educate, the way that I’m able to put complex ideas into something that’s simple. This is how you wanna be starting to map out your personal matrix for what’s possible for you going forward. Because I don’t believe that when we talk about reinvention, that it’s like, a black and white reinvention. , I’m not gonna be an NBA basketball player because that makes a lot of money and I love playing basketball tomorrow.
Like, this is just not in the world for me. We need to use our trajectory, in this moment, and then make smart decisions. So reinvention oftentimes can be subtle but powerful if you have awareness about what you actually bring to the table. In terms of unique skills and ways of doing things that, I found this over and over again, Chris, when people hone in on that, like the light bulb comes on and they’re able to see, oh yeah, I can make this something bigger, which I think is what you were pointing to here.
Chris: Yeah, and I think you bring up a really great and, subtle point, especially as we talk about reinvention, right?
Again, I say I am living my own reinvention. I spent about 20 years in corporate, in work that really wasn’t right for me, is what I’ll say to people as I’m going through this reinvention and I’m, in my coaching career, my second career, let’s call this, I tap into all that stuff that I learned during my 20 years in corporate, right?
I deploy all of that stuff. I mean, I don’t have to do a request for proposal for big software projects anymore in what I do now, but all of the skills of negotiation, I mean even, contract writing and negotiating, working with all the personalities, managing a team, managing data sets, and now all of that stuff.
Is all part of what I’m doing now. It all serves me. So I love the point you just made, Todd, around when we say reinvention, we’re not saying you have to push down the plunger and the dynamite blows up everything you’ve ever done before. Right. That is not what we’re saying. Right. Right. And what we’re saying is really recontextualizing all the things that you know and what makes you special and unique and that you want to tap into and lean into.
How can you recontextualize all of that to create the life and work alignment that most of us always are craving?
Todd: Right. And I think that’s why our recommendation is always to take this moment in time as a moment to do that self-reflection work and get in touch with the things that we’re posing today.
What are the real skills that I’ve learned in the past, what makes me a little bit different or unique. Right. One of the things that I’ve, done with people, and I’ve had them do this several times, which is create almost like a personal survey where they, get it out to a couple of their friends or even colleagues if they’re courageous enough to get some information about what others think their superpowers are or what makes them really unique from A work standpoint or even from a personal standpoint. Like, this is the time to be doing stuff like that to start gathering personal data. It’s what I said in the beginning about becoming, a CEO of your own life, of your own future. This is the time to expand your ability to see the horizon, to see who you are so that you can start making smart decisions and go through the reinvention process.
’cause we talk a lot about taking action, building new skills, all these things that we talk about as tenants of reinvention, they need to be initiated by, a moment in time, that can last anywhere from even just a moment to a period of time where you say, all right, I’m gonna do that work of internal scouring of who am I really?
Because I see this as an opportunity and I know that there’s gonna be people that really win big in this major transition that we’re in right now. At the end of the day, I believe that, I know you do too. There’s gonna be people that come out of this with businesses and programs and things that are beyond their dreams right now.
If they would just do this work, look at it from an optimistic standpoint, and then start to create something that has a real need in the marketplace, because there’s gonna be a real need in the marketplace no matter what AI does.
Chris: Well, I think you have to be leaning into it. If you wanna be one of the people that comes out and wins big, you have to lean into it and not run away from it.
We’re talking about being honest with yourself about what is unique about you and what is not so unique about what it is that you do. And being honest with yourself about the fact that the technology’s coming, it’s here, it’s coming, it’s accelerating, so don’t hide your head in the sand.
This is a little bit of a tangent, but I think back to talking about Bill Burnett going through the halls of Stanford saying to the engineers. Mm-hmm. Right. There’s no jobs or whatever it is. The flip side of that coin, I’m a poli sci major from back in the day, going into the political science department and saying, oh, and you people can code now.
you Humanities people who might have some creative ideas, but like never really could write a line of code. You actually have the ability to vibe code your cool app now. We can’t tell in this moment on net balance, maybe this is a human job creator. We really don’t know that.
There’s all these people who now have the ability to do really highly technical things and at this moment some of the code that comes out isn’t that pristine, isn’t that great. But as that evolves, you’re giving people this ability to recombine and to do things differently. And like you said before, Todd, people who don’t necessarily have a graphic design background, but they know a little bit to be dangerous now can lean more into that and be full fledged creators. We see that all the time. We see that all over social media too. Yeah. So I think it’s really, really cool. And there’s just a ton of opportunities in there. Again, so long as you’re honest with yourself about who you are, what you can and can’t do, and where your weaknesses are, and where you wanna lean in and learn and get stronger.
Todd: I think it’s a really good point. You know, we’re, we’re going off on tangent here, I want to take one as well. There’s this really big movement, Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk has been talking about it a lot. There are events in New York City and LA and even restaurants now that are requiring people to put their phones away, before they enter.
There’s a movement away from technology to some extent happening right now, even amongst the younger generations, right? It’s really spurning there, it’s almost like technology’s here and it’s like this, but the human beings are also having a reaction. And I think this also goes into the notion for some reinventors of, how can I create businesses and ideas that are human centric, right?
Yeah. Because there is a movement happening that’s really big. That’s why, coaching, consulting, helping people through transitions, communication, right? Thinking about it that way. Even local events, I think is gonna be huge, organizing local events or working with specific niche groups of people who need assistance and we have a guy in our community, right? Who was a big COO type and now he’s got this side hustle with a couple family members, right? That is servicing, a very particular market, in the creative space, with artwork, but it’s local, right? And it’s interesting, you know, that that is emerging and I think we’re gonna see a lot of that.
And so as you’re reinventing the call here and the purpose of doing this call is to have you thinking bigger picture, right? To have you thinking that there’s all these different ways you know, that you can reinvent yourself. Some of the people that are gonna be most successful are going to hear a conversation like this and are gonna start taking action in ways that they might not have before, that are gonna lead them down paths of success and fulfillment that they never dreamed of before.
Which is the whole reason why we started this podcast is to break us out of the old paradigm, the old trajectory, the very limited vision that we’ve had of following the sequence according to a plan, which now for a lot of people, is not working any longer, where we’re now forced to reinvent. But this is a moment to expand our horizon, right?
And to start thinking like really creatively, and maybe you’re right. Maybe it is around harnessing AI and starting an app and figuring that out. We don’t know. There’s no one size fits all. But the real answer here is to open yourselves up, turn into it, do that self-reflection work, start experimenting with the idea, start having conversations with people. Get out of the rudder of whatever, limited way you’ve seen the world to start to see what’s possible.
Chris: Yeah, I think you’re right onto something there too, Todd, which I do think we’re at almost, it’s a pivot point or a revolution around the human elements. I have young kids, right?
They’re elementary and middle school age kids. There’s already a backlash that’s happened in the schools and with the kids around the generation before them were so sucked into their phones, right? And I don’t mean this as a negative, I mean, it’s like the technology literally took us over and it hit us adults as well.
And I think we all have realized, wow, that was too much. That was too far. People were too sucked in. And so now the kids are putting their phones in those yonder pouches and not bringing them into school. And you know, I went to a middle school dance a couple weeks ago and I saw the kids on the floor dancing with each other, interacting with each other IRL in real life, right in the room.
And it was very heartening. I was very happy and excited to see that. And I just see that as a metaphor for what a lot of people are experiencing where, here’s the thing, the technology can be unbelievable. Mm-hmm. The technology can do all these things. People want to be with other people. Yeah.
We wanna connect with other people. We love being with people. As much as people say, oh, now I can just isolate and watch Netflix and never go out into the world. Most people, we are social. I would argue that that is possibly the thing that most makes us human. People are gonna fight for that. People want that.
I think that for our reinventors, this is a great opportunity to tap into the kind of the early tide of that. People describe AI as a tsunami. I think there’s a counter tsunami of humanity that is also frothing and building as we speak.
Todd: Haven’t you seen it even in our reinvention community where, you know, right now, at the time of this recording, it’s small, right?
We just have a bunch of people that are resonating with what we’re sharing and we’re doing calls around it, but we’re having real conversations, real human conversations, like authentic, vulnerable. like People mid-career that are in it right now. There’s no one answer for how you’re gonna reinvent. It’s just opening up the conversation. And haven’t you seen it, Chris? No one wants to get off the line. You know, we could stay on that call for two hours in the middle of the day and everyone will stay out for two hours , I’ve seen this again and again.
When you are opening up the door for real connection and allowing people to be authentic. This is why I’m talking about understanding your unique human. We love talking about reinvention. We love helping people with their careers and figuring out money and all this stuff, right?
And people get drawn into that because they also want that and they see some hope in that and they see some possibility in that and they don’t want to get off the line because they want more of that. And that’s how you want to start thinking about, for some of you, like what is possible for your reinvention, right?
There is something like community building. Another thing I mentioned, local community building is huge right now. And it doesn’t mean that you need to go out and start a community, but could you start having conversations with people in your life like I did with you? Right. And start to see, well, is there something that we could do together, maybe in person or maybe online that draws people together and that’s what people are willing to spend money on.
You know, they’re willing to spend money. ’cause at the end of the day, we’re also talking about businesses and having financial security as well. Right. And so it’s gotta be connected with that. Reinvention to me is not pie in the sky where it’s just , like, oh, do what you love and follow your bliss and it’s all gonna work out.
Like, no, no, no. This is the time to be smart. You gotta marry both. Figuring out what makes money. And I can tell you from all my experiences that the self care market, however you want to call though, I mean it is massive, it is a massive, massive business that. Is going to, in my personal opinion, go crazy over the next several years.
I think it’s gonna absolutely explode. So that’s why I’m motivating a lot of people start their personal brand or like start, doing things like that just to see where it goes.
Chris: We talked about this before, I think in another episode, we have a lot of conversations individually and in our group with people who, they’re like, I have this hobby, or I have this thing, or whatever it is.
I don’t want to tell people that they have to monetize every hobby that they have. Right. Because I think that there’s a balance and I think that sometimes something is the sacred thing that you almost don’t want to connect to the capitalistic urge or whatever it is. Mm-hmm. But when I hear people say things, this is the example I brought up before where I hear the guy who’s like, he wanted to be a pickleball coach.
He’s like, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if like, I have a good idea or whatever. I’m like, dude, I walked past Pickle Wall course that are jam packed every single day and there’s a dude coaching them there. And with all due respect to him, he doesn’t look like he picked up a paddle before last Tuesday.
If you’ve got two medals on the shelf behind you from the local pickleball tournament, go out there and make six figures. I mean, that’s kind of a flip example, but at the same time there’s so much of that where people have this thing hiding in them. You know, there’s another person I spoke to who’s like, their hobby is gardening.
And listen, I’m not telling you to monetize all your hobbies, but if you’re telling me you’re miserable at work and you do a thing that, you could literally just put the camera on yourself for half an hour a day while you do that. You’d probably have 50,000 TikTok followers in two months. Right. The cool thing about this at this time in history is there’s just more opportunity to do solo led online, slash local community, hybrid, influencer, content creator, all these cool things that didn’t exist five years ago, in a sense, in the way that they exist now, there’s so many opportunities and so at the very least, I’d love anyone listening or watching to take away, if you haven’t done this for a while, maybe take half an hour to think about, Hey, what other things are open to me in 2025 that, you know, in 2020 when I locked in and said, I’m just never gonna do anything ever again in my career.
Well, the world’s changed a hell of a lot in those five years, so maybe it’s time to do a little check in on that.
Todd: I’m gonna have a little real talk right now on this because I agree with everything that you’re saying and what I found, the number one mental block for successful reinvention is this internal idea, well, who am I to do that?
Or there’s already so many people doing that how could I start a gardening podcast? I just do it for fun and there’s a million gardening podcasts. Who am I to do that? Well, number one, it doesn’t mean that, just taking that example of what you shared, that that person needs to create a business around gardening, but what you’re suggesting is to expand it a little bit and be a little bit more fearless around expression.
And it doesn’t mean that she needs to do that, but it’s beneficial to explore that idea. Number two, the idea that there’s already so many people doing so many different things is the prison. It’s the mental prison where you’re never gonna take any action. Yeah. And Reinventors need to squash that idea.
And I’m very strong around this as you know, you’ve heard me coach, people forget about it. The only difference between somebody that is really successful doing something and someone that isn’t, is that that person that’s really successful, went out there and tried and probably failed a bunch of times or had ups and downs along the way, but found something. Reinvention, means taking action, new action, not just the same old action.
We talk a lot about people that, are in a position of potential reinvention and they’re scouring LinkedIn to recreate the same jobs. That’s fine. Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t judge at all. What we’re talking about is lifting up the record needle and starting to expand your idea of what’s possible.
If you’ve been feeling it all by listening to this, that, well, who am I to do that? Or I judge the idea of getting out my camera. I don’t want to be on social media. We’re not telling you that you need to do that. We’re just giving you examples of ways that you could tactically start to break down the mental and emotional and physical barriers from you doing new things that could end up being huge. We’re not saying, oh, you gotta start posting on social media. We’re just giving you some tangible ideas of examples that we’ve worked with of like, Hey, start thinking about it this way.
Chris: It’s such a near and dear topic to both of our hearts, Todd. And I think social media’s a great example. I’m not telling everybody that they have to go on social media, but I am gonna say that if the thing that’s holding you back from it.
If you have a passion and you could be a creator and you could show people how to garden better, let’s take that example and lean into it. I want you to just interrogate what it is that holds you back from that. If you say, I’m a private person, I don’t want to share, or I’m whatever, there can be choices that are sort of intention loaded choices that you make, and I honor those.
But if it really is just I feel kind of scared or what if people make fun of it? What if people think Ill of it, whatever it is, I’m not gonna berate anybody and tell ’em that you gotta break through that wall. Mm-hmm. But I am gonna ask you to interrogate that and to think about that because there’s a lot of fear reaction that holds us back from doing something that could be wonderful. Todd, I don’t think either of us are saying with rose colored glasses that anything you do like this is going to pop off the bat. But if the thing holding you back is , unexamined fear, I just think that’s a damn shame.
Todd: Your invitation to interrogate is huge. It’s like a big part of what we do in our community. A lot of what we do is having people look into that and then also create a new narrative, a possibility and excitement that tends to really cut through a lot of that fear. A lot of this reinvention that holds people back from successfully reinventing it’s what I said before, and it’s also fear of judgment, fear of looking bad, Here’s the truth. No one cares what you do. Like you think that they do, I’m gonna be a little stronger than you are on it.
Like I love the invitation to interrogate, but I’m also gonna be like, no one cares, they just don’t Like at the end of the day, this life is a blip in the Matrix. We are all dust in the wind. Like it doesn’t matter. You’ve gotta be connected with that. This is an invitation to be free. Okay?
It’s an invitation to free yourself from all these constraints that have held you back from not exploring who you really are, and even just the invitation to explore who you really are, right? So the idea of getting clarity, and getting a life vision and understanding what would make me excited is a part of the process.
That’s a real thing to tackle and take on. And maybe that’s where you’re at. Maybe you already have some ideas. Now it’s about getting the courage and the understanding and the coaching of what I’m saying here of, just do it, and learn. The way that I help people do this is look at it like you’re an experimenter.
You’re experimenting with these things and you’re curious, you’re a researcher with your life, and you’re kind of experimenting, putting out a bunch of new seeds. Having this conversation there and maybe starting a little channel over here and maybe sharing this idea, that’s how you want to start looking at it and being detached from the outcomes the best that you possibly can, and really unemotionally attached to whatever you perceive to be negative judgment coming at you.
Look, I get it, it’s real. Some people will judge you like they will be scared about what you’re doing and they’re not understanding ’cause they see you in a certain way. But reinventors need to be strong internally and they need to be experimenters with their life, and they need to get out of that so that way they can free themselves to find these pathways that are gonna work.
We have to do that work.
Chris: listen. We know that that is true. It is also though, if you’re listening, it’s like an easy for us to say mm-hmm. Type of thing. Right. And that’s what we work on a lot of times with people in reinvention, in the community and in our coaching, is I sit across from people all the time where I think intellectually they agree with me that there’s nothing, I shouldn’t be held back, quote unquote, should, there’s that word.
I shouldn’t be held back by external viewpoints or what I think, extrinsic, judgment or whatever it is, but it’s not always that easy to actually get there and to get to that moment. That’s where it is helpful to have a community. I mean, Todd, I’m gonna say this directly. We are great coaches.
We do amazing work with our people. I actually like even more sometimes when I see two people in the community connecting with each other. Mm-hmm. And one of them is in the moment validating what the other one is putting out there because you see the light bulb go off where someone who’s neutral and just open thinks really positively on this.
And that sort of kills the imagined demon of the negative voices that are out there.
Again, we’re putting ourselves on social media and everything like that, so I don’t know how often this happens to you, but if I encounter a negative voice there, it’s like really easy for me to go yeah, thanks a lot buddy. It rolls off me, but it takes practice. It is a practice, right. Of, internal confidence building, you know? And especially when you’re doing a brand new thing where you are a novice, you have to protect your fragile ego in some cases.
Todd: Yeah. We really started out by talking a lot about the what, like where do they reinvented pathways. But then we go into naturally just this conversation of the who am I, right now in this idea that I’m gonna reinvent my career. I’m looking at reinvention, and then really trying to understand, well, how do I navigate this based on who I am and who I wanna become?
When I think about why we’re doing this and why we’re doing not only this podcast, but the community is whoever I look at, I’m like, man, how can we help them? Create a future for their work and their life that is so on fire. So exciting for them, that’s beyond what they even thought was possible and it’s doing really well financially.
And it’s giving them, that level of success as well. That’s what we’re talking about. And so when we go into this idea of, the hard work of becoming more fearless or being detached from, the judgment or the fear of making change, like that’s just a part of the process, that I still deal with.
It still happens, you know, from time to time. Even having this conversation helps me. To see that part of myself, right. Even just being in this conversation as we’re recording, it helps me like, oh yeah. I know that, I know. I just need to keep moving forward, and keep trying, and that’s why having the community like just reverberates it, you know? And being around people who are also in the same boat as you, this is not a time to be isolated, this is not a time to be by yourself. This is a time to be around people like us, you know?
it doesn’t have to be us, but people like us and a community of people who are in a similar boat, because you’re gonna get not only ideas, but also solace and healing from being in that community.
Chris: A hundred percent. everything we talked about here connects and it connects in a really abstract and interesting way.
We started from like a, what you said, and we ended up really in, in a who and, a bigger picture thing. But it all ties through with that line of humanness. I mean, it really comes down to I am willing to fight for humanness. Mm-hmm. I think it’s the, exciting and wonderful part. I mean, it’s why I do what I do. It’s why we do this, right? I love being able to connect with and help humans, come into the fullest version of themselves. I think that’s the greatest thing in the world. And I’ll use all the technology I can and including AI to support myself in that journey without any worry that I’m going to lose my humanness or lose that connection.
I think if anything, that’s gonna be an enhancer and it’s just figuring out how to do that and leaning into that. you use the word fearless a lot, Todd, and I, I always want to tweak it. ’cause I wanna say it’s not fearless, it’s facing the fear and doing it anyway.
Todd: Yeah. Well said, brother. I, I agree with that.
Feeling the fear and do it anyway. Amen, brother, like, that’s what this is. I think you and I are just a stand for that humanness, you know, and it’s not rejection of AI and technology. It’s transcending and including, right?
It’s including it, making it better, and then making smart decisions about our lives. And it’s so juicy. Like we really hope that you’re benefiting from these conversations that we’re having and getting some real ideas, you know, about what you can do. Thinking out of the box, thinking about these new trajectories like
my personal hope for you is that this conversation spurned maybe some ideas about who you could talk to and where you could go to get some support or how you could start being that experimenter and like really thinking about your skillset. Who are you when you’re at your best and is there a way you could start aligning your work with that?
Whether it’s, directly working with harnessing AI or not. And I think this is just the beginning of the conversation, Chris, a lot of the calls are just gonna be about this, getting new ideas, like coming back here, make sure you subscribe to our podcast ’cause we’re gonna be continuing to do this a lot.
’cause we think there isn’t a more relevant conversation than Oh yeah than what we’re talking about right now. And I’m just grateful to be with you, my brother, like doing this.
Chris: Yeah, my man. I appreciate you. This Is such a critical conversation right now. I’m glad we’re having it.
Todd: Yeah. All right. More soon. Thanks everybody.
