Latest / FINE is a 4-Letter Word / 88. (S3E14) You Get What You Fight For with Christina Langdon

Transcript

88. (S3E14) You Get What You Fight For with Christina Langdon · FINE is a 4-Letter Word

• 0:03
  Lori Saitz: Welcome to Fine is a 4-Letter Word, the podcast that empowers you to say fuck being fine. Tired of being stuck in a place where you say everything's fine when it's really not fine at all. You're not alone. I'm your host, Laurie Sites. I've been there too, and so have my guests. Here's a secret. All it takes is a conscious decision to change and then restructure beliefs so your actions take you in the right direction. That's where Fine is a 4-Letter Word comes in. Each week, you'll hear inspiring stories from people who have transformed their lives and businesses and practical tips and takeaways to move you from spinning in place to forward action so you can create a life of joy. Thanks for tuning in. Let's get started. Get ready to meet Christina Langdon. She's a powerhouse entrepreneur, speaker and executive coach with a fighting spirit. She has over 30 years of experience leading sales and marketing teams at mega media brands like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Fast Company. In this episode, you'll hear about Christina's incredible journey of resilience and self-discovery from her childhood, lessons on hard work and money through her parents divorce to stepping up as the responsible middle child. Christina has always been a fighter. Her tenacity led her to become the chief revenue officer of Fast Company.
• 1:41
  But when the job didn't live up to her expectations and her soul was calling out for more, she had to pivot and challenge her past definition of success after a life changing diagnosis of AML leukemia. Christina took her fighting spirit to a whole new level, launching her own coaching business and writing her book for success sake. She's on a mission to help others achieve their extraordinary goals and encourages you not to wait for a crisis to make a change. Today's episode is sponsored by Zen Rabbit. If you'd like to find peace of mind amidst the chaos and no matter what's going on around you, you'll find a whole bunch of free resources like meditations and articles at Zen rabbit.com. And while you're there, if you're curious about how you might stop working so hard and achieve more success at the same time, get a copy of the Five Easy Ways to Start Living a Sabbatical Life. It's a short and free guide to working less and living better. Find it all at Zen rabbit.com. Now strap in for a roller coaster ride of redefining success, building self-belief, and doing the work to figure out who you'd like to become. Hello and welcome to Fine is a 4-Letter Word. My guest today is Christina Langdon. Welcome to the show, Christina.
• 3:11
  Christina Langdon: Hi there. I'm so excited to be here.
• 3:13
  Lori Saitz: I am really looking forward to this conversation. So let's jump right in and start with the question that I love asking people, which is what were the values and beliefs that you were raised with that contributed to making you who you became as a young adult?
• 3:31
  Christina Langdon: Especially hard work? Was probably number one. My first job was when I was 11 years old. I was watching. I was washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in my hometown. So she had us working early, hard work. My mother would always say, like, you write your own life script. So she very much was like, you know, you get what you fight for, you work for. There was some scarcity around money as well. My mother was my my parents were divorced when I was 11. And when we moved into our new house, my mother had this beautiful black and white picture book. It was one of those big $70 books that you'd buy at the Barnes and Noble now. And it was on our coffee table in our living room. And the name of it was The Bag Ladies of New York City. And so I think that that's where some of my money mindset came from as well. So hard work, perseverance and. Uh, and make make your own money.
• 4:45
  Lori Saitz: So yes, we were talking in our pre show conversation. I don't know if this came up, but my parents got divorced when I was 11 as well. So it's just that that age where you're in between like you're not a kid, but you're learning about stuff and it's really impressionable. I heard you say your mom taught you that you get what you fight for.
• 5:07
  Christina Langdon: Yes.
• 5:08
  Lori Saitz: So did you always feel like you had to fight for everything that you needed?
• 5:15
  Christina Langdon: You know, Yeah I think that I have. I felt like I was fighting for everything growing up. And I have a new relationship with that now. I think that's changed as I've done a lot of work. But I do think I had I felt like I was fighting. Some of it was survival because my mother worked very hard. My senior year in high school, she traveled 50 weeks out of the year. She not the whole week, but so I kind of raised myself. So, um, I think there was a fighter in me and I think that fighter has served me very, very well until it didn't. And I've had to like, redefine that relationship between having the life I want without the fight. So it's a work in progress every day. Yeah.
• 6:05
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, right, exactly. Did you have any brothers or sisters?
• 6:09
  Christina Langdon: I had an older sister who's six years older. I have an older sister who's six years older, and I have a younger brother who's five years younger. So we had some distance between us. So my sister was out of the house during my teenage years, and while my mother was traveling, I was really I was really, you know, the person in charge.
• 6:29
  Lori Saitz: That's a lot for a young kid, you know, a kid in high school who wants to have no responsibilities. And you had to, right?
• 6:36
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. So there was a lot of responsibility. But then I would say, you know, the good part about it is it's what kind of defined who I was. I took responsibility very, very seriously at a young age and started creating the life that I wanted at a very young age. So some of it's really, really good, served me really well and created the success in my life. And some of it was also very hard, but it really made me who I am.
• 7:04
  Lori Saitz: Absolutely. I'm not saying that any of the anything any of us have been through is to look back and go, I wish it had been different necessarily because, yeah, it did make us who we are. So then how did that that outlook serve you or not serve you as you started getting into a career?
• 7:24
  Christina Langdon: You know, that's a really good question. Um, so I worked really hard because I knew when I was driven that I to get what you want, you have to fight for it just like we've talked about. So I graduated college. I went out and I got my first career. I wanted promotions. I was going to work very hard for what I wanted. I ended up getting the promotions. I worked for a public relations firm right out of school, and then I got to work for Time magazine. Then I went to work for Martha Stewart for 20 years, and there I had a successive rise in different titles. I was there for almost 20 years. I ended up I was associate publisher of her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, for many years. I was the publisher of Body and Soul magazine. I was also the publisher of Everyday Food. So I was leading the sales and marketing division of the company, and I was clawing. I was going up that corporate ladder. Right. Hear me roar a little bit. And my last job in media was as the chief revenue officer at Fast Company. And so I had like ended up in the C-suite and I thought it was going to be easier. Like I wasn't going to have to fight so much.
• 8:42
  Lori Saitz: Right after I get to the top. I don't have to fight as hard. Is that. Yeah.
• 8:46
  Christina Langdon: No, I just I really did think this should be easier. And so when I got there, I had all of these thoughts around, Wow, this isn't what I expected. There was disappointment. There was something was not aligned. There were all of these whispers saying that I was meant for something else, even though. What do you mean something else? This was supposed to be it. There was a lot of conflict. And while you could look at my CV or my LinkedIn profile and see this successive rise of a career and I looked like perfect on paper, what ended up happening is I was really perfectly miserable and needed to do the work because I'd fought for all those years. I'd fought for what I thought would make me happy because you get what you want. My mom said, You go fight for it. Well, I fought and it wasn't making me happy. So what would make me happy? And there was a big reconciliation there.
• 9:44
  Lori Saitz: Why did you think that being at the top would be easier? Like, where did that thought come from? That's just because I'm interested. It's an interesting idea.
• 9:55
  Christina Langdon: I just saw other People at the top and what looked so much easier for them, so I was comparing myself to others. I was comparing myself saying, Well, if they can make it look easy, then I'm sure it'll be easy for me. And you know, what is how do you even define the word easy?
• 10:16
  Lori Saitz: Well, I was going to ask you, did you ever have conversations with those people that you were looking at to find out if it was, in fact, felt? Did it feel easy for them or did they just make it look that way? So you thought it was that way for them?
• 10:31
  Christina Langdon: It's a really good question. And off the top of my head, my first thought is, no, I didn't. I just looked at them and Thought I wanted to role model who they were, but probably like just like everybody behind closed doors, you know, we're having, you know, fights in our head about how difficult things are.
• 10:50
  Lori Saitz: Yeah.
• 10:51
  Christina Langdon: And I do think that I did think that I at the C-suite, I'd be setting the vision and I'd be working on high level stuff and that I would just delegate everything away. And that was not the recipe that was going to work.
• 11:09
  Lori Saitz: Was that not the recipe that was going to work because of the industry or because you just had a misconception around how it is up there?
• 11:19
  Christina Langdon: You know, that's a that's another really good question. I think it was more about my expectation for the role. And it was it was was sort of not in alignment, but I think it was all came from that. Those sort of the whispers of this isn't really what I should be doing. So it was making what I was doing more difficult, even though I have to say, like some of the the irony, some of the biggest accomplishments in my career were the last several years in media. I mean, I did some absolutely amazing things, but those whispers and the nudges, I mean, they were there.
• 11:57
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, Yeah. So did you allow yourself to celebrate those wins or did it feel like, okay, yeah, I did this, but I'm not really feeling fulfilled, so I'm not going to celebrate it.
• 12:12
  Christina Langdon: I you know, I was working in an organization that was looking to get build in more profitability. They were at a very low profit level, and that was my role as chief revenue officer was to create more profit. And when I took the job, I was told I would have complete autonomy. So I'm pretty self-directed, right? And we've talked about I'm a fighter. Yeah. So and I also felt that I had the recipe. I had a recipe that I was proven in my 20 years at Martha Stewart, where there was lots of crisis, lots of up and downs that I had learned enough there that I could take this recipe and create a difference. And what I learned when I got there was that I didn't have complete autonomy. And so that is why I work for myself now, because I know what success looks like and I know I can create it now. I'm creating it for myself instead of for somebody else. Because without that autonomy, um, I think that really was, really took the wind out of my sails.
• 13:27
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, I can imagine it would. Because if you're promised something and that's. And something as important as autonomy. Yeah. And then you don't get that. That's a big blow to your drive. I'm trying to put as much as.
• 13:49
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. To drive to my expectations to how I ended up showing up like so, so much. And what's so interesting as well, I was frustrated from that. It wasn't I wasn't given the autonomy. I didn't really recognize it until after I left. Awareness is so powerful.
• 14:08
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, So so you right. It just felt uncomfortable, but you weren't really sure why? I think it's funny just to back up for a second. I think it's funny that you used the term that you had the recipe and you were coming from Martha Stewart. I just laughing at this over here.
• 14:26
  Christina Langdon: I didn't even plan for that. That's a good one.
• 14:30
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, you should use that again. Yeah. Okay. So you how long were you at Fast Company? And what, what was the the the turning point where you went. All right, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. I need to leave and go find my. Find what it is that I need to do, what my soul is telling me.
• 14:53
  Christina Langdon: I probably would Have liked to have made the decision myself. So I ended up I ended up getting I call it exiled because I think I like that I was exiled from Fast Company. So Fast Company is owned by a company that's called Mansueto Ventures and they also own the media Brand Inc. So essentially I worked on the business side, advertising and marketing, and they combined the two leadership divisions from both magazines into one. So the woman was was exiled.
• 15:32
  Lori Saitz: Okay.
• 15:33
  Christina Langdon: Yeah, but it was good. I mean, when I look back on it, it gave me the time to say, okay, I did some really great things there. And I also was in a bit of conflicts, which gave me the time to say, okay, let's really do the work. Where was the conflict coming from and what do you want to do next? And a lot of people thought I would just go and get another job or a big name job in the media business. And I loved media. It wasn't that I didn't love media. I just didn't love what I was doing. I cared less about the quarterly numbers and I cared more about the people and getting the people to see what they couldn't see for themselves and getting the people to see what they could see a little bit more clearly. So I was given the time to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. And you're talking about.
• 16:20
  Lori Saitz: The people on your team?
• 16:22
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. And that had always worked for me. Like I knew I could lead very high performing teams. It was something that I'd done. So, you know, I went from the dishwashing at 11, right? And I took a leadership role. By 13, I was the manager of all the the waitresses. I was, you know, worked for steward surveys in a management position when I was like 15 years old. So I always it wasn't so much that I wanted to be in the leadership role as much as I was driven to help others become their best steward surveys, you would make more money the more surveys you did. I would teach them how to do that. I would teach the waitresses like sort of how to make better tips.
• 17:08
  Lori Saitz: Which plays to that whole idea of you don't have to have the title of leader to be a leader. You just do it and then you just.
• 17:20
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. And you know, it depends on like the, the word leadership has a lot of different definitions. Just what you said. I mean, you don't have to be the top dog to be a leader. It's more about influence. And like one, you know, as I've worked to define success for myself, I say that I want to be successful. And, you know, the last three letters I make them into four. I say successful f u l, l, And I want to be full of more ease, more joy and more impact. So the impact I don't have to be the leader to have impact. I can just do that by helping influence people, by helping support people, by helping being kind, right?
• 18:01
  Lori Saitz: Yeah. Everybody has the ability to do that. No matter what your formal role is in just in life. We all have the ability to do that.
• 18:13
  Christina Langdon: And just because I don't have the title doesn't make me any less of a fighter.
• 18:21
  Lori Saitz: Yeah. So you still identify very strongly with being a fighter?
• 18:27
  Christina Langdon: I do. I think, you know, as you Asked me, like growing up I think once it's ingrained in you, it's Ingrained. And now I'd like to think that I fight for other people.
• 18:37
  Lori Saitz: Yeah. Were you angry when you were For myself.
• 18:40
  Christina Langdon: And I also fight for myself. Like, you know, I'm a cancer survivor, so, you know, going through AML treatment for a year. You know, I had to I had to do a lot of fighting and, you know, kind of circling this all back to my story. So I was diagnosed with leukemia on April Fool's Day. It was no joke and put into the hospital for this year long treatment. And so when you think about having to fight for my survival, part of what I fought for was creating success. So what I part of what I fought for was a survival tactic. A fighter tactic was I launched my new coaching business.
• 19:30
  Lori Saitz: Allow me a quick moment to thank you for tuning in to Fine is a 4-Letter Word. If you're enjoying the show, please take a second to hit the follow button so you don't miss an episode. And if you haven't already, I'd love it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts. Your feedback helps the show reach more listeners like you. Fine is a 4-Letter Word is available on all major podcasting platforms, so no matter where you listen, you can stay up to date with the latest episodes. Now let's get back into the conversation. First of all, how long after you left or you were exiled from Fast Company? Where did you get that diagnosis? And the other question I was going to ask is, were you angry when they exiled you? Or did you immediately see it as an opportunity like the universe was giving you the opportunity that you had wanted but didn't know?
• 20:36
  Christina Langdon: No, I mean full transparency. That didn't come for a little bit.
• 20:40
  Lori Saitz: Okay.
• 20:41
  Christina Langdon: Even though it really was the gift. You know, when I was exiled, I was like, wait. You don't know. This is this is all coming around. This is all happening. There's so much more to do. So I think where my disappointment, my anger came from was what a missed opportunity. They're letting me go. Felt like a missed opportunity because I knew we were like minutes away. I had made such an inroad. And of course, the quarter and the the year after I left was one of the most successful years that brand had ever had because I had done all the right things to help the team come together to create a more successful enterprise. So I think it was more about like it felt like a missed opportunity because I was so close and it probably took me, you know, a little bit to to get over the disappointment. But I knew Being the fighter, right? I knew that there was something more for me out there.
• 21:50
  Lori Saitz: Okay, so then how soon or how long after you left there? Did you get that diagnosis?
• 21:59
  Christina Langdon: It was about a year later.
• 22:02
  Lori Saitz: Okay. What were you doing in that year span?
• 22:06
  Christina Langdon: It's a good question. My husband and I opened up, we bought a local business, and we decided that we wanted to do something that we no longer wanted to commute to New York City, that we wanted to do something that was local, that was actually within the community, and we wanted to make that our next chapter. So we bought this existing business that had been going for ten years, and when we took it over, we were actually drinking from the fire hose, trying to figure out, you know, how to run this, this local business. And I got this phone call from and I knew, by the way, the whispers I was talking about earlier, the whispers were going louder and louder. Like, I've got to figure out what my purpose is. And, you know, fine is not a four letter word or Fine is a 4-Letter Word. I felt like purpose is like a four letter word, too, right? Yeah. And, you know, it was like and I think, you know, for f sake, I wanted to figure out what my purpose was. And I got a phone call from somebody who I had worked with at Fast Company on my cell, on my cell phone, and she said that she wanted to make sure that she reached out to me. I was one of the few people that she'd reached out to since she had had this horrible concussion which put her behind closed doors for about a year because it was her ninth, her ninth concussion.
• 23:27
  Lori Saitz: Oh, my gosh. That's a lot.
• 23:29
  Christina Langdon: So she's like, I had a Lot of time to think and I wanted to reach out to you to let you know that you changed my life both professionally and personally. Why aren't you a coach? You have the ability to help people. I mean, it was it was crazy. And it's sort of like kind of opened me up. It sort of cracked me open and was like, I've been toying around. Like I would make fun of myself because on any given day, working for Martha Stewart and all of the challenges and crises there, you could find me at the 46, the 46th Street, Barnes and Noble in the self-help and personal development aisle. So I had this like, sort of knack for the personal development, executive development, leadership development space. And so when she said it a little bit, cracked me open. And so the - I held my first workshop. Uh, it was a four hour workshop on how to lead your extraordinary life with eight women, and I wasn't feeling well. Three days later, I was diagnosed with leukemia.
• 24:34
  Lori Saitz: Okay. Wow.
• 24:35
  Christina Langdon: And so I felt a little robbed. Like I finally found my, you know, you know, my purpose and my f my effing purpose. Right. And I felt robbed. And so I didn't want to be robbed. So the fighter came out. I wanted to survive. And I also wanted to launch this business. And I'm not pounding my chest because it was a very difficult year. But me launching the business while I was getting treatment was a little bit of a survival tactic.
• 25:06
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, I would think so. I mean, that's some pretty brutal I don't know if it was brutal. If brutal is the right word for the treatment. Yeah. Yeah. And you're launching a business which is a difficult to say the least, experienced on top of that. So. Yeah.
• 25:30
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. Brutal. Don't.
• 25:33
  Lori Saitz: Yeah.
• 25:33
  Christina Langdon: But you know what? I came out and, you know One of the things I say to women right now and is that like, you don't want to wait for a health crisis, you don't want to wait for burnout and health issues to decide that you are deserving of more and to give yourself permission. You know, oftentimes and I know we talked about this earlier like we are as women, we're we're told to like go to college and get that first job and get married, have kids. And then all of a sudden, we're raising our kids and we look around one day and we're like, is this it? Is this it? And so, you know, I wrote the book for success sake, and I wrote it with that woman in mind that this isn't it. We've got the rest of our life. We've got more than half of our life to live. And why not rediscover if you have an itch for more, why not rediscover it now? Because when you're happy, your family, your husband, your friends will be happy because they're going to be seeing you happy.
• 26:43
  Lori Saitz: Right. It's our responsibility to find our happiness in order to then radiate that out and spread that joy. So many people and I've had so many guests and I've heard it, you know, because we read the same kind of books and listen to the same kinds of podcasts and stuff about not waiting for a crisis to make a change. And yet still so many people are like, Yes, yes, yes, I hear that. But they don't actually take it in. They don't actually follow it until there's a crisis.
• 27:21
  Christina Langdon: Until there's a crisis. And so I. Think it was Dan Sullivan who has said, like, if you want your future to be bigger, better, happier, you have to be thinking about it bigger and better. Like you have to be thinking about your future, not some time off in the future. It's not out there. You have to start creating it today. And when you think about a better, a bigger future, you start making decisions that are bigger and better. So sometimes we keep thinking like the bank account has to be bigger or we have to think about getting our kids to college before we can get decided around what we want. And if you just think about for me, what worked is I just thought about what was. Possible. For me in my future, what's possible when I'm happy, who will I become when I give myself permission that I want to create something different?
• 28:17
  Lori Saitz: That is the the thing I love so much is who will I become? I love that question and asking that question of ourselves. And I've talked about that before on this show, too. Who who would I like to be? Who would I like to become? And stepping into that. And I'm also happy that you said it doesn't matter the size of your bank account because I've had a lot of conversations This this whole season has been focused around taking sabbaticals or talking to people who have taken a sabbatical. And so many people I've heard from who've listened to these episodes are like, Well, yeah, but I can't afford it. And in the question again is almost, well, how can you not afford it because you are suffering on what is it costing you? Yeah. What's it costing?
• 29:10
  Christina Langdon: What is it costing you To not get decided around what you deserve? So like people. Expected me to go back, stay in the media business, right? And I had expectations of myself and I had so much judgment about becoming a coach, what would people think of me? And instead I started saying, well, who would I become if I became a coach? Now, you've got to remember, I also had those. What about the bank account? Yeah. What if I can't build a coach? What if I fail? Right. So I had to say, well, what? Who would I become if I had paying clients? So the whole notion of who I will become is something I write about in my journals all the time. So when I started writing the book, who Will I Become when I'm a book author? That was a really big one because I have written, you know, I've got like two books. I wrote a I wrote a book that got lost on the computer, got just corrupted. It was called From Martha to Mother. That was my first one. I wrote another book while I was in a treatment. Neither one of these books have been published, right? So I kept saying like, Ah, am I going to do this? So I finally think I decided to publish a book When I did, when I really did the work on who would I become when I did.
• 30:35
  Lori Saitz: I love that. That is a great exercise for anyone listening to pull out a journal or even just just think about it. You don't have to write it down. Who will I become when I reach that ideal situation?
• 30:55
  Christina Langdon: And you know what? Another prompt I use a lot. Is who will I become when I break my own glass ceiling?
• 31:06
  Lori Saitz: Ooh, I like that.
• 31:08
  Christina Langdon: You all have these Glass ceilings, like I've said it here on the podcast, like my glass ceiling. I was thinking, well, do I have to stay in the media business? I was thinking the media business was my ceiling when in fact, I broke through that thought to become a coach. And who would I become by breaking the glass ceiling and actually publishing a book? Like All of a sudden when I wrote about it, I Could see it. And as soon as I saw It I couldn't unbecome it.
• 31:41
  Lori Saitz: Yes. Yes. It's that whole idea of I have to see it to believe it, which isn't always correct.
• 31:50
  Christina Langdon: So building belief is One of the hardest things I've ever. I haven't you know, we've talked about me being a fighter, but I've never believed in myself until recently. It really took a long time for me to build belief that I was the creator of my destiny, just just like my mother was saying. Right? And I finally started believing in myself after I did the work, too. You know, one of one of the quotes I say is you are the biggest influencer in your life. And when you recognize your influence over you, it's a game changer. So I when I Finally Started believing myself, I said, okay, how do I want to influence my life? And I broke it down into really small, easy, bite sized steps. And I created influence over myself to create what I wanted and looking at and thinking about and writing about, okay, where is the evidence? Of my belief, where have I already created it? Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy have written a book that's called The Gap and the Gain, and they say that your success, you've already created your success, your future success will come from your past success. So when I'm building belief, I look back on the success that I've created to see where I can pull from it, to build belief about the future I want to create.
• 33:23
  Lori Saitz: Is that how you work with your clients too? Because that's a really difficult thing to do on your own because we have blinders or blind spots about our own success.
• 33:34
  Christina Langdon: Yeah, And the first place you have to start is defining what success looks like. And when you when you when you actually define it. Because most people don't. Most people spend more time planning vacations than they do defining what success looks like for them because we know it's not money. We know it's not things. It comes from a decision that you make about how you want to feel. So I work with my clients To help them build belief and find the evidence of what they can create so that they can believe in their results ahead of time.
• 34:13
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, you know, I like that. Who was it? It was one of my past mentors who said something to me about believing in me until I could believe in myself. Like he was holding the belief in me for me. Until I could see it myself, until I could get there.
• 34:36
  Christina Langdon: And when you-
• 34:36
  Lori Saitz: That's what a great coach does for you.
• 34:38
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. And when you saw It, what changed for you? What was different?
• 34:44
  Lori Saitz: Well, then I could step into being who he was already seeing me as.
• 34:50
  Christina Langdon: Isn't that amazing?
• 34:51
  Lori Saitz: Yeah. Yeah. And but and this is, again, why people need coaches to help them get to this place. Like I say this all the time, it's really difficult. So you were talking about doing that. You had to do the work. Were you working with the coach? What were you doing when you say you were doing the work to figure this out?
• 35:15
  Christina Langdon: I had my First coach when I was back working at Martha Stewart, and she was really out there and I resisted at first. And when I started realizing why am I resisting, the company is paying for this. Coach. How about embracing it? What would it look like if I embraced it? So I coached myself on being coached by this crazy coach and she was amazing. I look back and I'm like, Oh, but it really was like, Oh, look what she's doing. She's changing people's lives. So that sort of gave me like a little bit of an appetite for it. But when I did the work on myself, I was so tired of myself. That's the other thing. Stop waiting till you just get so tired of yourself, you know, to start believing in yourself. So I did the work. I went back and got certified in leadership coaching. I got certified in emotional intelligence. I read a lot of books. I listened to a lot of podcasts and took a lot away and created sort of my own frameworks for, okay, I'm going to take what other people are saying and how am I going to apply that to what I want to create for myself? So is a fighter good or bad? What do I think about fighting? Right? What do I think about being a fighter? How is being a fighter served me? How is a fighter not served me? When I think about like why was I perfectly miserable in the C-suite? Was it because I wasn't a good leader? No. But when I got when I got exiled, sure, there were all the thoughts of I did something wrong or I was bad. Like we shame and blame ourselves, right? Yeah. And no. I found the evidence of what I had accomplished. And from that evidence, I was like, okay, I accomplished a lot, but I want to do more instead of the blame and shame. So I kind of put myself into my own, like, personal development.
• 37:11
  Lori Saitz: Nba Okay. Yeah. I find that that is happens fairly frequently as well. People start studying coaching because they want to understand themselves, not necessarily because they have a desire to become a coach, but that's what ends up happening because now they have all these great tools.
• 37:30
  Christina Langdon: And if you're going to work with a coach, you've got to make sure that that coach is a product of their own product, right? So I coach a lot of people in the C-suite, I coach a lot of chief executives and founders because I've been a chief executive, I've done it and we need to be a product of our products.
• 37:52
  Lori Saitz: Absolutely. You need to understand that where they're coming from and they need to know that you understand exactly where they are and where they're where they'd like to go. Very cool. All right. Where does this story go now? What is your. Where do you see yourself moving? What is your future self?
• 38:15
  Christina Langdon: Well, now that I've Published the book, I've sort of become. So now I have to figure out who I'm going to become from From from. There and. I am very, very excited because I want to be able to scale my work and I want to be able to create more impact, doing less. Now, you know, I'm a fighter and I work really hard, but I do want to reclaim more ease and joy. So I am actually redefining what success looks like for me so that I can have more impact, which means I have to scale, right? Somehow scale with less time. And so that's that's a work in progress that I'm working towards. But what I know, because I love what just came up to me when you asked me this question is, you know, Fine is a 4-Letter Word, right? And I won't sit in fine because I'm a fighter. Right? I just I'm a high performance coach. Right. And when we say we're fine, that's generally a sort of a flashing light that I want to do more work on myself. So my business right now is fine. It's doing so well. But that sort of that itches. Maybe that's the whispers again, saying What's next? Who will I become next when I've scaled and created more impact?
• 39:45
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, well, I mean, this whole process of becoming is an evolution. That's. That's the evolution of our life.
• 39:53
  Christina Langdon: And I feel like if I'm just like, So when you. Think about it, somebody asked me, on a scale of 1 to 10, where's my life right now? And my life's Pretty, it's pretty good. You know, I've survived cancer. I've survived like getting job Loss, right? I've survived starting a company and doing well. So I'm at like eight, nine. Dare I say ten. And so a coach said to me, What if you were at a two? And I'm like, Oh my. Gosh, if this feels so good at two. What will I do for the ten?
• 40:30
  Lori Saitz: Yeah. Yeah. That is such a good question too.
• 40:35
  Christina Langdon: Fun, right?
• 40:37
  Lori Saitz: Really fun. And also just the whole idea of you can be at a ten and that doesn't mean that you are that you are complacent there. You can be overjoyed. Life is fantastic and that doesn't mean that you don't. That you don't strive for even better.
• 41:02
  Christina Langdon: Yeah. And I don't want to be Pollyanna. Like life is 5050, right? We have good days and we have bad days. And I have plenty of bad days. Just my bad days are a little more joyful than they were when I was sort of perfectly miserable. Yeah, but so what an exercise I'm working on as I become my next self is I'm going to become a student again. So I'm going to tear down all of my business. And I'm saying that a little bit, not literally, but I want to become a student of my business again. I want to become a student of my product again. I want to relook at everything through the eyes of being a student. If I had to create it all over again What would it Look like now? And so I just I just started on this new project yesterday.
• 41:52
  Lori Saitz: Oh, wow. So you heard it here first.
• 41:59
  Christina Langdon: Where The growth is and so becoming when you're becoming you're growing. So I want to I want to, like, embrace the student mindset again to see where the growth is.
• 42:15
  Lori Saitz: Very cool. I'm excited to to watch and see what comes from this from this examination. Christina, what is the hype song? What is it? The song that you listen to and you need an extra boost of energy.
• 42:32
  Christina Langdon: My hype Song is This is Me. And it's from the movie The Greatest Showman. And if you pull it up or listen to it, I want you to listen to it with the video And Not the video of the one where she's doing it in the movie, but the video of when they're practicing it, it's on YouTube. And so anytime.
• 42:54
  Lori Saitz: Like, yeah.
• 42:55
  Christina Langdon: Yeah, anytime I want to like give a great workshop or I'm giving a talk, I typically put it on there because this is me. I'm not perfect. I have plenty of warts, I have plenty, plenty of weaknesses, and I am who I am. I oftentimes say like, I've got all these the certifications and whatnot. I've gone to college, I've been in the C-suite, but I'm not an expert in any of it. The only thing I'm really an expert in is myself. And so this is me.
• 43:26
  Lori Saitz: Yeah, Here you are. So if someone wants to continue this conversation with you, where's the best place for them to find you and connect with you?
• 43:40
  Christina Langdon: Well, you can find me on my website Which is ChristinaLangdon.com. But if you want to continue the conversation, you can subscribe to my newsletter. I put out a newsletter that's called Sunday Sunshine and it comes out on Sundays because often times we get that the the Sunday scaries when we're thinking about the workweek ahead. And so I drop a message into your email every Sunday to help you think about creating the workweek ahead that you want. So you can subscribe on the website and you can find me on Instagram at Christina Langdon, Boss Lady.
• 44:20
  Lori Saitz: Very cool. All right. I'm going to put links to all of those in the show notes as well as to that version of this is me that you were talking about.
• 44:29
  Christina Langdon: Oh, great. I love that.
• 44:31
  Lori Saitz: Thank you so much for joining me today. Christina on Fine is a 4-Letter Word.
• 44:36
  Christina Langdon: Oh, Lori, this was so much better than fine.
• 44:42
  Lori Saitz: What an honor to have this conversation with Christina. Something I don't think we mentioned in this interview is that she and I grew up like five miles from each other. The timing of the universe and when you end up meeting certain people is always interesting. Here are the key takeaways. Number one, growing up, a fighter can be a mixed bag. You get what you fight for, but what you get might not make you happy. It's important to cultivate a life where you don't have to fight anymore. Number two, a title is not required to be a leader. You just have to lead. Number three, don't wait for a crisis to decide that you are deserving of more. If you have that itch, the time to discover what's calling you is now. Number four Life is bigger than the size of your bank account. Instead of wondering how you can afford a sabbatical, ask yourself what is it costing you not to take one? Thanks for listening to Fine is a 4-Letter Word. If you've enjoyed the show, please follow and share it with a friend. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite platform to help others discover it too. You can find links to my socials on my website Zen rabbit.com. And before you go, take a moment to reflect on what you're grateful for today. Remember, you have the power to create a life you love, and I'm proud of you. Thanks for joining me. Take care.