Feeling stuck, uncertain, or finding yourself refreshing LinkedIn to chase the same uninspiring roles?
In this episode, you will learn the most important trait necessary for any successful reinvention. Todd and Chris will show you how to create clarity as an action, experiment like a founder, and detach from perfect outcomes so you can build momentum fast.
They’ll also cover practical ways to test side hustles, open new income streams, and help you develop language so you can talk about ‘what you’re up to’ with confidence. If you want motivation plus concrete next steps, this conversation is your green light.
Great for: career reinvention, mid-career pivots, side hustles, fractional work, entrepreneurship, and anyone who wants security and freedom in their next chapter.
What you’ll learn:
- How “getting clarity” counts as action and the simple prompt to spark it
- The fail-fast mindset for reinventors (the stakes are lower than you think)
- Ways to open new income channels with small, fast tests
- How to talk about your new identity so opportunities find you
- The role of detachment and why “share the build” beats “wait until perfect”
- 3 “unreasonable” actions you can take this week to create momentum
**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
Todd: This is a moment to be flexible.
This is a moment to be adaptable. This is a moment where, dare I say it, you’re having fun. You’re actually putting stuff out there in new ways.
Chris: So Todd, I’d like to know what we’re talking about today, man.
Are we gonna be starting something? What are we doing?
Todd: Yeah, yeah. We’re doing a little thing that we call taking action, which I mean, let’s be honest, when you’re in a process of reinventing yourself, reinventing your career, there’s a lot of things that we talk about on this podcast, that can help.
But I don’t think there’s anything more important than getting in the mindset of taking action or maybe more specifically taking new action. Because a lot of the people that we work with, and I know a lot of your clients, Chris, scouring LinkedIn for the same jobs or recreating the same career has diminishing returns to it.
So what we’re gonna be talking about today is this notion of taking action and also helping people self-identify where you’re at within this concept of reinvention so you can understand what actions you need to take, because depending on where you’re at, the actions are slightly different. So the goal here, and we’re gonna give some takeaways from this session, is to give you a couple of things to do so you can kind of be in action.
Because staying frozen, staying scared, staying behind the sidelines of, oh, well this doesn’t really affect me yet, is not really a good game plan.
Chris: Yeah, but Todd, wait a second. I have a question coming up. Alright. What if I don’t wanna take action and I do just want to stay behind the sidelines and then everything magically works out without me taking action?
Todd: I mean, this is where the tough love comes in. I mean, let’s be honest, I’ve dealt with a lot of people who have that attitude and unfortunately had to come to the realization that change is necessary, especially in the state of the world. And look, we’re not here to force people to take new action or to make change.
We’re here to help people who have gotten to that point to some degree. Reinvention is something that is absolutely necessary, and it doesn’t have to be like this, oh, terrible thing. It can actually be fun. I mean, look, our whole premise, our whole concept is this idea that your next career can be one that is aligned with a future for yourself that matches your lifestyle, your money making, even your purpose. As opposed to the game that you played before, like reinvention’s an opportunity to create deep alignment. When people say that to me, I’m like, that’s fine, but I really wanna be talking to the people that can find that level of potential excitement about what’s possible, because that very thing can drive you to take these actions. That’s how I look at it. Yeah.
Chris: That’s how we got into this mess, right? If you’re in a moment where you’re like, yes, I want the outcome of the action, but to take the action sounds, ah, that sounds really painful. I don’t really want to go there.
I don’t want to do that. Sorry. You know, there’s no step one, step two, question mark, step three, profit. Like we’re talking about step two here, where you’re actually in the muck and you’re doing the thing and it’s messy and it’s a little scary. It’s different, it’s painful, it’s experimental, it’s trial and error, right?
It’s all of that stuff, and that’s really the magic of reinvention is in that messy middle.
Todd: I can tell you as a coach for this long, helping people do this, 20 years of doing this. I’ve seen this with so many of my clients, that going through a process like this and getting clarity and creating a game plan and working on your mindset and taking action, like the tenets that we talk about here all the time to reinvent yourself has a bright future.
There is something that can be absolutely extraordinary, like a new life. You know, a new work where you make money, where you’re doing work that’s aligned with what you’re really here to do. Like it’s absolutely possible. And this call, like the taking action part, might be the most important thing because if you’re not taking action, it’s just not gonna happen for you.
You need to be doing things. And what I love about this, Chris, is that we talk about taking action and I said it before. Depending on where you’re at right now. And I think for a lot of people, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the air and for some of the reinventors that we work with, they’re not sure, right?
Like they’re not actually sure what that future is or could be, and therefore the act or the taking action part needs to be about getting clarity, taking some time to do that work to first get a vision or a series of possibilities about what your next steps could be that have some level of excitement behind it that have some level of hope.
Because we’re living in a world that’s not telling you that all the time, but we’re here to tell you that it is possible and to remind you that you can break free from these old trajectories. But we gotta start there, right? We gotta start with getting clarity and creating some form of vision or a series of visions that wake you up in the morning that have you getting some fuel in your step, right?
Chris: Yeah. That can be the first action in a sense for a reinventor, I just had this conversation a couple hours ago with a prospective client, right where before we met, had exchanged a message around like feeling stuck. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what I want. And I just had asked, listen, before we meet, just think on what you might want to do without any constraints. Just kind of gave a prompt around that. Mm-hmm. And when we had our face-to-face conversation this morning when we got to the part where he is talking about what he might wanna do with no constraints. First time the guy smiled in the whole conversation.
Todd: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Saw his whole face light up as he talked about this thing, which by the way was a really practical possibility that something that could be a business for sure. I’m not saying that’s what he’s gonna end up doing, but it was not some pie in the sky imaginary thing.
Todd: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Just. Taking the action of literally thinking about that and writing down. I think he said he had like 10 or 12 options that he thought of opened up like a portal in him to this world of possibility that could exist. Just went from being like, I’m stuck inexorably there’s no place I can go to. Oh, maybe there’s something. And honestly like right there, just maybe there’s something that spark. Is, well, that was life changing for me when I experienced it, right? Mm-hmm. I think Todd, our clients this is kind of like an underrated, life changing moment. The first moment that you think, Hey, it could be different.
Todd: It’s like you lift up the record needle for a second that you’ve been on, the rat race thing. You’re running on this treadmill. And then we’re here to say, wait a minute, just for a moment. Take some time to get clarity.
Just for a moment. Do what Chris just said, take the prompt of what could I do? What interests me? Just free yourself. You don’t have to do anything with it yet. That’s why the first tenant in reinvention that we keep talking about is getting clarity because we know, that when you take the time to think about what would make you happy, and this is for people who have that, I’m stuck. I’m not really sure. I’m not happy. I’m burned out. I was just showing the door. I don’t have any new ideas. Like I get it. This is a journey to reinvent yourself. It’s not an automatic thing that just happens. Okay. And the clarity piece, you gotta start there. Because creating that, what we call that north star, does something to the subconscious mind.
It gives you something to orient. When you said that he smiled for the first time, like this counts that’s what’s gonna drive action. Being happy, being excited, you know, and I just don’t know why people aren’t fully getting that. You gotta create a vision that wakes you up in the morning.
It doesn’t mean that you become this pine, the sky, woo woo person that’s just walking around in dreamland. Yeah. No, we work on that stuff later. Okay. We can build tracks towards making some of these things come true, if not all of it. But you gotta start there as a strategy, like as a real life strategy, and then we start doing some of these other things that are necessary.
So I love that you just shared that.
Chris: Honestly, just a great experience for me, even to witness that every time I get to witness it, right? Mm-hmm. And it’s just. Like you said, we didn’t end our conversation by saying, okay, quit your job. Go do your dream that’s not the way it works.
I think it’s important getting clarity is an act. It is a process. It is an act. It is an objective thing. And yeah, this is in the coachy part of things where we’re like, find your North Star. Think about your big picture. Like it feels very esoteric and theoretical, but it isn’t. It’s an act of commitment to the possibility of joy.
It’s important. It’s really fricking important to get most of us out of bed in the morning.
Todd: I love this conversation, man, because there’s a lot of reasons to be fearful in the world. There’s a lot of reasons to be dismissive, of doing something like this.
And I’m just here 20 years as a coach saying this is so important to look at. Getting clarity, like a strategy you just said it, codify it, it is something. And then we have other people in the reinvention spectrum, if you will, who are at a different stage, right?
Meaning that maybe things have already been started, or there’s some side hustles happening right now, right? And there’s a little bit more action because there is an evolution, in reinvention, meaning that everyone starts out the same, like, oh my God, I don’t wanna reinvent. Like, oh, let me look for another job.
Let me do this. Okay. You take the coachy advice here, you start getting some clarity. You start seeing that it’s probably more necessary than you would like to believe, that you need to start thinking about this more creatively. And then things do start happening, And at that stage in the process, people now have new opportunities in front of them, that may feel different than they were before. And then taking action often requires something a little bit different. It’s not necessarily about getting clarity, it’s about experimenting with new things in the world, experimenting with a new identity of yours that you’re now wearing. And there’s a saying in Silicon Valley, I’ve worked with a lot of, uh, tech people, right?
And so a lot of startup folks, and there’s a saying, fail fast, you know, in Silicon Valley. That’s a mantra embedded in a lot of startups. And there’s something around reinvention that that applies to applying that fail fast attitude to us as we are now exploring new options. And when you get to that second stage of reinvention, you start looking at potential new careers or even entrepreneurial ventures, and we’ll talk a lot about that on this podcast. But you wanna have that attitude of trying things, trying things, taking action, failing fast learning, getting back up on it and trying new things. Until you start to find that flow.
Chris: Yeah, and I think it’s important to remind people like the stakes are actually really low in this moment, right? In the moment when you’re turning the corner to saying, Hey, I’m committing to reinvention. I’m figuring it out, and I’m in it. I’m taking some action.
I wish I had the stat, we’ll have to pull the stat. Hey, Jamie. Could you pull that up?
Todd: Where’d you come up with the name Jamie, by the way?
Chris: That’s, Joe Rogans guy. Oh got it Okay. Yeah. Yeah. He is always like, Jamie, could you Google is the sun round? Is the sun round? Jamie, could you Google that? I totally lost my train of thought from that. That made me laugh.
Todd: Yeah, that was good. you Were saying there are some stats around taking action
Chris: Okay, this is it. People who are entrepreneurs specifically, let’s use them as a model. Most entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs, which means they start multiple ventures, which means that they experiment and which means that they fail. Todd, when you say fail fast, that’s a scary phrase to me, in my corporate mindset back in the day.
Mm-hmm. It’s like, fail. I can’t fail. Yeah. I must be a success machine Like that is just what I do over and over and over again. We’re not talking about like catastrophic failure here. What we’re talking about is fairly low stakes experimentation, trying a new thing, exploring whether the theory that you have in your mind as to what might be a business, let’s say, is actually supported by some people in the market.
Mm-hmm. And putting it out there and maybe doing a little free services for somebody and seeing if it’s actually what they want and things like that. Anyone who started a business and anyone who’s successful in starting a business, they had 25 failures before they actually hit success. Yeah. Or whatever it is.
Todd: That’s absolutely right. And actually it goes to the point that we’ve talked about before on here, which is the idea of starting to earn money in new and different ways. Even if it’s very small in the very beginning, it counts. We’ve talked a lot about the fact that we met on TikTok, two middle-aged guys we met, we started this podcast in our community. I have like $20 sitting in my TikTok account. You know, it’s nothing, but it counts to the extent of that’s a possibility for me now, like money has actually come in. I have personally, several different sources of income that come to me from things that I’ve done in the past, from new things.
This is the mindset of reinvention, is looking out into the field of possibilities when you have an idea that what is possible and you get that clarity, and then you start to play. And I think a lot of what you’re talking about is this notion of, taking action, failing fast, and then being detached from the results.
And that’s hard for a lot of people that are starting at a reinvention because especially for people that have worked their way up the corporate ladder for a long time, like they’re not used to that. You weren’t used to that idea. Like there is no failure or things can take a long time. This is a moment to be flexible.
This is a moment to be adaptable. This is a moment where, dare I say it, you’re having fun. You’re actually putting stuff out there in new ways. And you know, people have a problem with that because there’s fear of being judged. There’s fear of not looking good. There’s fears of like, who am I to do that thing?
Mm-hmm. But this is the time if you get anything from us, this is the time to put all that aside and start taking action and embody this notion of being detached from the results. Okay. And it’s easier said than done, but it’s a very important part of what we keep talking about here, about mindset and keeping your mindset positive and optimistic.
But it’s such an important part, that detachment piece.
Chris: And I also think it’s a beautiful time in the world to be a reinventor and to be trying something new because. Many of us social media is part of our plan, right? To put ourselves out there and to put out what we’re doing. And if you look at what’s happening on social media, there is a trend towards authenticity, towards rawness, towards watching people build it live, right?
Watching people start from smaller or start from scratch and show you the journey of how they’re building themselves. So I feel like the ancient stigma that we’ve all inherited of having to look polished and having to like, you know, I come from a mindset of it’s maybe an inherited, two generations depression type of mindset from my family of like, you close the curtains you build in private, and then you only reveal it when it’s perfect and shiny and ready.
And that paradigm is dead. Dead. It’s over, over in 2025 and 2026. That is over.
Todd: Yep.
Chris: Look at some of the creators out there. Even some of the established big business people out there, like look at Gary Vaynerchuk or something like that. Mm-hmm. You’re getting the whole package, you’re getting the whole thing, you’re getting all the context.
It’s sharing as you go, as you build. Not to say that there’s not a place for Polish. Mm-hmm. Right. When you’re at a phase in your business, and if that’s what your business requires or your work requires, it’s not saying that that doesn’t have its value, but it’s saying you don’t have to feel trapped by this idea of, I can only reveal my symphony when it is finally polished and perfect.
Todd: So well said. Man, I can’t echo that point enough. And I’ve seen too many people really set themselves up in the reinvention process for disappointment. When they are literally building like that mad scientist behind the scenes and then revealing to the world and then disappointed because the results didn’t happen.
That’s not what we’re talking about here, and it doesn’t mean by the way, that you have to start a social media account and start like doing everything. I’ll give you a good example when you were sharing, I remember a client of mine came to me about a year ago, and this was somebody that was pretty high up in the corporate world and either was really burned out or being shown the door.
I forget which one, but it was on right and hired me as a coach and I got to him like, what do you wanna be doing? And actually, this person wanted to be more of a public speaker and like a workshop leader. And we started doing some work around like the content, like what do you want to teach?
And it turned out. he had a bunch of really great ideas for workshops that he could offer to his current employer. That was just a need, but it wasn’t really like it within the realm of his current job, and eventually he got let go or left. I forget again, which one. And then went back from our conversations and offered this workshop to his company, and they paid him $5,000.
I’ll never forget to deliver a workshop to his now former employer. So he came in as a speaker, as a workshop leader. Right. He said it was the best day of his life. I’ll never forget, him letting me know you got paid to do this. And then it was about, it wasn’t just roses from there because then he needed to continue reinvention and learn all these new skills.
Well, how am I gonna take that one thing that I did and maybe create it into a business? And he had to learn new skills, right? Which is another big thing that we talk about here. Once you start reinventing, he had to learn a little bit about. Sales and marketing, which wasn’t his forte.
It’s like, all right, how do I get this out to other companies? Or how do I now upsell this into my current company? Whatever it was, I forgot the path he went down.
But that’s a really good example where he could have then holed up into, oh, okay, like I got this one thing. And my recommendation was, no, this is the time to be in action.
And it doesn’t mean that your delivery isn’t gonna be polished. It was very polished what he did, but he was still taking a lot of action and, lo and behold, this became his whole career. I mean, the guy’s been like doing a bunch of things in this world. It sent him down pathways that he couldn’t have expected.
But I think it goes to what you’re saying, right? Which is just go for it. And the answers are there if you’re taking action.
Chris: There’s also that sense of detachment that you alluded to before. Mm-hmm. Where it’s my first action outside of corporate. The first contract that I landed when I decided to do something out of corporate was not really what I wanted to do.
At that time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just grabbed something. I said, oh, this might be good. I made a lot of money from that. Mm-hmm. I made more money from that than from the things that actually I was drawn to.
Todd: Was it consulting or fractional work? Like what was it
Chris: That was more that was consulting.
it could have gone down the road of fractional leadership, but I didn’t let it go down the road of fractional leadership. I did a consulting gig and then it was gonna turn into me potentially leading, and that part has said, no, I don’t want to do that. Mm-hmm. Because I, I want to go a different path, but I think the, the idea of attachment detachment, it was hard for me in that moment to look at the check coming in from that gig and say, I really should replicate, I should do three of those gigs a year, and then I’m golden. But that wasn’t what I wanted. Mm-hmm. Because I had been experimenting in other ways. And honestly, you know, I’d made a couple of bucks here.
It was like we’re literally talking about tens of thousands of dollars and like $500. Right. And I said, the $500 path is the one that I want to go down and scale and expand because my heart is there.
Todd: Yeah.
Chris: Now I know not everybody has necessarily the privilege of that choice.
And a lot of times when we talk to people, we say that’s why the multiple streams of income thing is so great. ’cause it’s like, hey, if you can keep doing this and maybe get one of those gigs a year while you explore as yet less lucrative but more heart aligned path, right? There’s so many different flavors and areas along the spectrum of what you can do, but it all starts with taking action and like you like to talk about Todd.
Just a new way to make money, even if it’s 10 cents here or a thousand bucks there, or whatever it is. That’s a channel that once you open it up, you’re like, oh, that’s a channel I can earn in essentially forever. I can replicate what I did there and lean into that.
Todd: Yeah,
Chris: And it’s so freeing to have six of those instead of the one that you had for 20 years or whatever.
Todd: It’s so juicy, man. Yeah. You’re such a reinventor. Obviously we’re doing this together, but there’s so many things within that, you know, first off, we’re gonna do an episode around the financial planning part of reinvention that I really wanna pick your brain on. ’cause you’ve done such a good job of being smart around your finances.
It’s like the on the ground thing that we don’t always talk about in every episode, but how to plan.
Chris: It’s not the most exciting coachy thing in the world.
Todd: It’s so important, you built proper runway to explore because some people would be in that position and getting paid tens of thousands of dollars for a contract that is still reinvented but doesn’t juice you, and then have this other thing that’s like 500 bucks, but does juice you and you have the ability to go towards that thing, I’m guessing because you had proper financial runway in mind with you and your family and your kids and everything to actually go do that. So it wasn’t just a privilege that you were given, you were smart about it. And I think we do wanna go into that, in an upcoming episode.
So I don’t wanna just poo poo it. I think it’s really valuable.
Chris: Yeah, no, I I do think it’s valuable and I think a real takeaway before we even get into that part of the conversation is just for people to realize that they can take their flavor of this, and this is what we do in reinvention in the coaching community all the time, Todd Mm-hmm. is we’re filtering picture ideas to meet the circumstances of the people that we’re talking to. Right. And there’s so many different flavors of this. I mean, we were talking to a guy in the community the other day, great conversation where it’s like, the way he looks at his life, he says, I really want a reliable, stable corporate chunk.
Whether that’s fractional or whether that’s a full job or whatever it is. And we are helping him understand that keep opening up this new path of entrepreneurialism on the side. You don’t have to put all your eggs in that basket. You can keep looking for this and you can keep exploring that and keep this alive because something’s happening here.
There’s a spark here. It’s lighting you up. What we, I think would both hate to see is as he’s building this sort of newer venture that a big W2 walks in the door and he goes, I’ll just take that. And he drops that completely. Right.
Todd: And that could happen. I mean, this is the world. And it’s like he’ll make that decision. But we want him to make that decision from a very evolved sober place where he can really see all the opportunities that are in front of him. And I think on that particular call. His eyes opened to the idea that, wow, there are things that he could be doing and ways that he could be looking at this new business that is emerging that are different than he was doing at that time on that call.
Right. Yeah. And a lot of this, we’re gonna do a whole episode on building new skills, but when you’re reinventing, you’re reinventing also your identity and who you are when you’re working. And that hit home for him where he is like, oh, I need to look at this more like I’m the CEO of this company and I need to understand sales and marketing.
Where for him, he’s an operations person, right? You could see his eyes open up and he got excited around the opportunity to potentially be a new version of himself that has autonomy, and learning and curiosity, at its core. Now, we’ll see what happens. He may get another gig that’s a W2, and he may choose to go back to that.
That’s totally fine. What we said to him was that going down this pathway of reinvention and really exploring it and allowing yourself to grow and explore who you are, and learning new skills is going to be worthy no matter what happens.
Chris: It’s gonna make you even a better asset in a trad job anyway.
Right? Yep. I mean, just to have put on that CEO hat and made those difficult conversations and partnerships and strategic conversations and thinking that is only going to enhance, even if you go back and you say, here, I’m gonna do this, and I’m never even gonna look at this venture again.
That’s just gonna help you grow. again, the downside is so minimal here. I think that’s one of those things I, I caught myself for years being obsessed with the downside of like, what if I make a mistake? What if somebody sees me trying something and it doesn’t work out?
We could probably do a whole podcast episode about the mindset of being, obsessed with seeming like you’re getting it right all the time. Mm-hmm. And how much that holds you back and anchors you. And that fear of any perception of failure. Frankly, it’s just no way to live actually.
Todd: This is the deeper stuff, right? Dealing with your own personal identity and then having to change that, and the fear of letting go of the past and creating what’s new. That’s why one of the things that I just love in the reinvention process, and I really say this to everybody and our community and clients that I work with, is that when you’re starting to look out into the future, right?
You get that clarity and you’re starting to look at the future with bright eyes, like opportunistic eyes and you start to meet the doubt and fear which is gonna come up, right? It does come up for all of us, right? Any great leader or person that’s been successful will tell you that.
A very practical way to combat that is to realize that no matter what it is that you may want to do, even at the most idealistic state, there are already, a million people or more, most likely, who have already done that thing or are doing that thing successfully that are probably worse than you. I mean, I tell people this all the time and we told this gentleman this on the call, it’s such a powerful lens to realize that you have the ability and the capacity to reinvent your career in so many different ways because others are already doing it and have done it. Yes, you may need to work harder. Yes, you may need to work smarter. Yes, you may need to build new skills. Yes, you may need to change your mindset and work on that. You may need to do all the things that we’re talking about here, but it’s possible.
Okay. It’s possible. And when I look out in my own career and I look out for the people that I’m modeling from and learning from, and I see what they’re doing, they’ll say the same thing. They tell me I failed a million times to get here. So that gives me the realistic motivation to be like, all right, well, I guess I’m gonna fail a bunch along the way.
I’m gonna fail fast, but I’m gonna be detached. I’m gonna keep going because I know that there’s a possibility for me to hit the vision, of what I see for my life. And that’s reinvention, being connected with that and then going through the process and then getting people like us to support you or others to have accountability, which is the other whole thing we’ll talk about here.
But that’s the key thing I think, in this whole thing.
Chris: That’s a super important concept, right around the fact that the vast majority of people doing the thing that you want to do, or that looks like what you want to do, are not special in terms of they do not have a special talent. They don’t have some sort of magic, they don’t have something that goes beyond what you could possibly ever have.
Mostly what happens is they did it. They took action, they tried, they failed, they made mistakes. They learned, they kept going. They did it over and over again. I mean, insert online successful person, guru slash celebrity here, and we’ll have Jamie look up all their failures. You know, I mean, really, truly, like, look at anyone, anyone that you wanna put up top of this list, right?
They have made mistakes. They have done the wrong thing. They’ve taken wrong turns, they’ve failed. And I think it’s really important, like we talk about Todd, letting your talent be the limit of what you can do. Right. I love that. That’s something we love to embrace. This idea of push yourself to the limit of your talent, not your effort or discipline or focus or confidence in belief in yourself to be able to do it.
And if you look at the people honestly, whatever is your thing that you are reinventing yourself into, whatever that is, honestly, look out there. I bet you could go find a successful person who’s making millions. Who doesn’t have anything you don’t have. I bet you could find them in five minutes on the internet.
Todd: It’s absolutely true and completely humbling when you realize that, humbling and motivating at the same time. That’s why this thing of taking action is at the core of this, all the rest of it comes to the point where you’ve gotta go out there and try new things and do things differently because the world is changing really, really fast.
Okay. That’s at the core of this podcast, is this idea that, man, the world is changing fast. And we wanna help people find that success lands really fast. And it’s possible that it could be more aligned with your future that has excitement and your purpose and more money and all that.
But taking action is so key, right? The takeaways from this and what we encourage people to do, if you’ve gotten to this point in the episode is literally get out a pen and paper if you haven’t already, or get out a document and start renting out what two or three unreasonable actions that you can take this week until we release our next episode.
Okay. That we’re stimulated by this conversation. What actions can you start taking that may feel a little bit like uncomfortable. So a couple of ideas just even based on what we’re talking about. This notion of learning new skills, who can you learn from? Who can you model from? Who can you start following? Do they have a course? Do they have a community? Do they have a book? , This is what you wanna be doing. Okay. Do you need to have conversations with people at your current work or are there new conversations that you can start instigating that maybe you wouldn’t have before you listened to this?
don’t isolate, reinvention is an opportunity to reach out and have conversations and be honest, we didn’t cover it so much on this call, but having authentic, real conversations, even if you’re in that first stage of you don’t really know what’s next. Reach out to people and say, Hey, I’m in this place right now and I would love to meet up for a coffee, or I would love to have a conversation on Zoom just to see what you’re up to.
Like, that’s an unreasonable action for a lot of people. But right in there holds the seeds for things that will emerge after. This is not a time to be frozen. This is not a time to remain isolated. This is a time to actually like be in the world to start learning and talking and having conversations and then start doing things yourself. You love that idea of unreasonable actions, right? And I think you, I love that. And you’ve done a lot of that, like you did that so beautifully.
Chris: What I love is we use it a little bit ironically because it’s perfectly reasonable actions in many cases, but it feels unreasonable to your stuck self, right? The person that’s a little bit scared of taking action to reinvent and dragging your feet. I wanted to latch onto something you said, Todd, if you see that person who’s out there, who’s doing the thing you want to do, or something like that, that’s a model for what you might want to do.
Be genuine, be authentic, be real. If you ask someone to just actually have a coffee and talk to you about their thing, or you want to pick their brain and connect with them, 90% of people, I think if you approach them authentically and genuinely would love to have that conversation. We can call this portion of the podcast, Chris, takes the piss out of all your excuses.
Because I think that’s one of the ways that we talk ourselves out of it, is like, well, I, you know, I, I don’t wanna reach out to that person, or whatever it is. If you’re genuine and authentic and real, you are gonna get good results from those conversations. I’m also gonna give you three of my examples of, call them unreasonable, very reasonable actions that I took at the beginning of my reinvention.
One, I signed up to be one of the first clients for a new coach, right? There was a coach who was putting his own shingle out and he was looking for some pro bonos and new clients, and I volunteered to go do that. It was through a friend of a friend, life changing, honestly turned me onto the idea that coaching even existed, and that’s how I’m here today ultimately.
But not something I would’ve necessarily said yes to even a year before then. I signed up for a course around how to focus my business and some marketing communication, and I paid for a course and subscribed to that. Nothing I would do in a million years prior to that. One of the first actions I took when I was launching my coaching business was I sent an email out to 40 of my contacts who I thought it might be relevant for. Not quite a cold email, but not particularly warm, and meaning in terms of those people being ready for it and just put it out there and said, Hey, I’d love to offer some free services to people if anybody wants to try this. Mm-hmm. That’s where I got my first 10 free clients. That’s where I got my first paid client ever.
That turned into referrals to other paid clients. all of these things, by the way, were uncomfortable for me. Didn’t feel like the sort of thing that I would do. So they’re all examples of taking action, taking maybe what feels like unreasonable action. And you know, the list could go on, Todd i’m sure we could probably come up with a thousand of those such things that we did in the course of our own ongoing reinvention and business building and all of that.
Todd: Yeah. I mean, the thing for me was around learning that I really needed to understand digital marketing and communications better than I thought that I did.
And that was humbling for me because I thought that I was good at it, but I wasn’t. And that’s when I did what you did. I was like, oh, I need to learn from people. And I invested in myself, right? I invested in not only money, but time, to learn these new things. I took action, which is what we’re hoping you’re getting out of this conversation.
The most important thing is to not just sit around and bemoan everything that’s going on in the world and with your life, or to focus on the challenges that you’re having in reinvention. It’s not. Necessarily the smoothest writeup. For some people it may be, but this kind of requires you to really look in the mirror and go through a process.
And, one of the actions of course you could take is to join Chris and I. We have a whole community that is dedicated to Reinventors, we would get on coaching calls and we help people and coach them. And there’s others that you’ll find that are also in this process, which I believe really, really helps because it’s not like we can always have this conversation with people that we’re really close to yet, you know, like there’s a process for communicating our reinvention hopes. But when you’re around others that are in the same boat, it makes it easier and you find inspiration and that’s always an option for you to check us out and what we’re doing there.
Chris, whenever we talk, it makes me really feel how many different lenses of conversations we can have. I’m taking notes about how many different ways that we can share practices and perspectives about how to reinvent and to reinvent faster with more success. That to me is always the goal.
When we win, it’s when someone has taken the advice on, taken the coaching on, looked at new pathways, found things that they wouldn’t have found before that have been able to create success, and income and a lifestyle that was unexpected before they had met this concept.
I feel like we just moved that ball forward on that today. Yeah. And I’m even more inspired than ever. Yeah.
Chris: Some would even say that their expectation was unreasonable. Mm-hmm. Until they went and took action, and then it turns out it might have been pretty reasonable after all.
Todd: Jamie, go take that one down and, uh, you know, write it up for us, Jamie, and then we’ll have to get a lawyer for when Joe Rogan sues us for some reason.
I don’t know, but, Chris, man, so good being with you. We have so many more juicy episodes. Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast here and we look forward to getting to know you.
