If you believe there has to be another way to work, you gotta listen to this entire interview.
Liz Ryan will leave you feeling empowered to take back control of your work. She wants to inspire you to bring all the parts of yourself to your work.
She is one of my favorite career thought leaders because she tells it like it is, not what you want to hear.
She’s the founder and CEO of Human Workplace. She’s been writing about the changing workplace for the past two decades. She is a former opera singer who fell onto the HR path almost 40 years ago.
She’s one of the top LinkedIn influences on careers with over 2.8 million followers. Also, check out her website to see her artwork, which I like makes her content so much more human, instead of your typical stuffy career website. She does it all herself.
In 2016 she published Reinvention Roadmap as a way to help reframe our concept of employment away from the existing models that currently dominate the corporate world.
Lot of great lessons in our conversation including:
- How hierarchies have made work toxic.
- Why companies aren’t as disruptive as they think.
- How management structures are often designed to take more than they give back.
- Why more of us are capable of working for ourselves than they have been led to believe.
- How the illusion of job security makes your career more vulnerable.
- Why it’s so important to focus on a niche.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Reframe your mindset
- Practice self-awareness
- Build your community
How Liz Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: 7:00 – 8:30 am
- Core work activities + habits: 1) Write stories and course curricula. 2) Draw pictures. 3) Do podcasts and videos.
- Regains focus by: Going to baseball games.
- 90-day goal: Working on web development as well as a new book proposal, moving from business into entertainment.
Inspirational Quotes
“We have evidence in front of our faces every day that full-time employment is exactly as secure as a leaf floating down a stream.”
“The most important thing to identify at any point, when you get altitude, when you stop and look at your career, is, ‘what am I good at, what am I interested in?'”
“No one will have confidence in you, until you have confidence in yourself.”
Coaching Advice
To start feeling more confident in what you want to do, Liz provides this advice:
1) Get clearer on your path by stepping back a bit and looking at your life.
2) Find the people that grow your flame and spend time with them and then limit your time with people who detract from it.
3) Create space for yourself which will, in turn, signal your importance back to yourself.
4) Start journaling and if you’re not sure how to start, use something like Liz’s 25 journal prompts.
Resources + Bonus Materials
Frederick Taylor and Max Weber Organizational Theory
Reinvention Roadmap by Liz Ryan
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